Empire Falls

anyhow. After you said good-bye and started to walk away, you’d see them bend over and whisper something to their kid, and you’d know what it was. That guy back there? That was Billy Barnes. The best from around here to ever strap on the blades. Couldn’t miss. Except he did.
    “Ambition,” Jimmy heard his father say. “It’ll kill you every time.”
    William Minty had been dead for years, but his lectures had survived him. His only son, watching the parking lot and the street near the Empire Grill fill up with cars, could play them back in his mind more or less verbatim. “They got it all figured out,” the old man would announce from the threadbare old armchair he piloted in the evening. His father was always solemn and silent over dinner, but once in the living room, with Walter Cronkite on the television, he grew talkative. Cronkite, Jimmy suspected from his father’s knowing nod, was one of the ones who had it all figured out.
    “Figured what out?” he’d found the courage to ask, just that once.
    His father regarded his son with curiosity, as if he couldn’t figure out how any kid of his could be so stupid. He nodded at the TV again. “All of it,” he explained, then stared long and hard at Cronkite. “In school they tell you it’s a free country, I bet.”
    Jimmy couldn’t deny that he’d heard this opinion expressed on more than one occasion.
    “Yeah, well, don’t you believe it. They got the whole thing figured out, believe me, and they’ve thought of everything. Who they’ll let you marry. Where you and her are gonna live. How much the rent’s gonna be. How much money you’ll make. Which ones are gonna die in their wars. All of it. You think you got a say? Think again.”
    Jimmy thought all this figuring had to be pretty complicated. It would require a lot of organization, and making everything come out right couldn’t be easy. You’d have to depend on a lot of the same people his father complained couldn’t manage to get you your unemployment checks on time, wouldn’t you? He suggested as much to his father.
    “Yeah? Well, don’t you worry,” his father assured him. “If you don’t believe me, watch this know-it-all tell you how it is every night for about twenty years, then see if you don’t think they’ve got it all figured.”
    From where Jimmy sat in the living room he was able to see the Roby house across the driveway. Many evenings Miles’s mother would pass behind their living room window, sometimes stopping to pull the curtains shut. At nine years old, Jimmy had thought Mrs. Roby the prettiest woman he’d ever seen, including girls, and he wondered what it would be like to live in the same house as her. He guessed maybe it’d be different if she was your own mother, but he couldn’t imagine not having the hots for Mrs. Roby, no matter whose mother she was. He’d caught his father looking across the way a couple times, too. Jimmy had even made the mistake of telling Miles how lucky he was having her for a mother, all to himself, most of the time, Mr. Roby being gone as much as he was home. He’d also asked Miles if he’d ever seen his mother naked, hoping for a description, and Miles hadn’t spoken a word to him for a week, until he apologized, which Jimmy was quick to do, because he was afraid Miles would tell his mother that he was a dirty boy.
    So Jimmy thought about what his father was telling him about Walter Cronkite and the rest having it all figured out, and he hoped his father was wrong. He didn’t like the idea of having somebody else decide who he’d marry. That was a choice he’d hoped to make himself, and he intended to marry someone who looked as much as possible like Mrs. Roby. Or maybe Mrs. Roby herself—later, when he was old enough, if her husband died or disappeared completely. “Nobody can figure out everything,” Jimmy ventured hopefully.
    “No?” his father said, watching Cronkite carefully, so the other man wouldn’t be able to put anything over on him. “Well, maybe not everything. But they got the main things covered, that’s for goddamn sure. And don’t you ever doubt it, neither.”
    In a nutshell, his father’s philosophy about how to deal with these people was not to appear ambitious. Don’t call attention to yourself, was his advice. Keep your eyes open for opportunities, but don’t get greedy. Steal small. Make sure if you’re caught, they don’t catch you with much. Remember “the bother principle,” as