Calling Home

by Michael Cadnum

  “I heard about that.”

  “I think you know where he is.”

  I felt cold. “Of course I don’t. What a silly thing to say.”

  “You’ve been acting very odd lately. Odd even for you. Lani mentioned it. She’s worried about you.”

  “Lani’s a very nice person.”

  “And I’m not?”

  Angela is everything but nice. But I spoke carefully. “You’re both nice people.”

  “I think Mead is hiding out somewhere, and that you know where he is. I bet you get together with him and drink. I’m going to figure out where.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “There’s something funny going on. Look at you—twitching and sweating. Lani’s right—there is something wrong.”

  “My mother’s been acting hysterical lately. If you had a mother like mine, you’d be strange, too.”

  Angela tilted back her head and watched me. Not in the way Lani would look at me, but as though I were an insect skewered by a pin. “I’m going to tell Mead’s parent that you know where he is.”

  “Don’t do that!”

  She thought. “Maybe I won’t. But my brother’s coming back soon. I’m going to have him check you out.”

  “How’s your brother going to ‘check me out?’”

  “Wait and find out.”

  Angela’s brother, Jack, had been in and out of trouble with the law for drugs and petty crimes like extortion and attempted murder. He had been sent to military school in Stockton, and word was that he had turned around and planned to join the Marines. I had been terrified of him during his criminal phase. He scared any thinking person. He was a large, square-headed hulk. He was also smart, in a shifty, unpleasant way. The idea of this military ex-thug coming to check up on me made me fidget.

  “I’ll tell him you’ve been abusing my affections.”

  “What does that mean? You don’t have any affections.”

  “It implies sexual abuse, or something dishonorable like that.”

  “You’re a great friend, Angela, you know that? A terrific friend.”

  She gave me a smile I did not like.

  10

  Lani answered the door herself.

  It was not the first time I had visited her large, ivy-covered house, but I did not do it often.

  Her father was a heavyset man who always had a book in his hand. His hand swallowed mine for a moment. “It’s good to see you, Peter. So you’ve come to hear Lani play the piano.”

  “Yes, sir.” I usually hated calling men “sir,” but there was something deliberate and serious about Mr. McKnight, and he made me respect him without any effort on his part.

  Lani’s father could be very grumpy. He hated to answer the phone, and he always, even now, gave you the impression that you had interrupted a very complex train of thought. He was a man who valued his time, and he didn’t care to have his time abused by a skinny white kid with a dumb expression.

  He had the same serious way of speaking that Lani had. Her mother had died of cancer years ago, when Lani was three. She could hardly remember her mother, but the loss seemed to make both father and daughter take things seriously, their words, and their actions, had weight.

  “I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance,” I said.

  “Young people can’t help being nuisances,” said Mr. McKnight. “You’re not so bad. You’re a quiet sort of young man. I think you could go along and not bother anyone.”

  I hoped that I had been paid a compliment, of some sort. I wanted very much for Mr. McKnight to like me.

  Mr. McKnight left us alone with the piano, a baby grand that was polished and very dark. The sight of it made me weak. It reminded me of a coffin.

  “Your father always seems busy,” I said.

  “He has many cases. Some attorneys only think about money, but he doesn’t. You better sit down and get ready. I practiced this all week.”

  Lani put her hands on the keys, and the room changed.

  It was the most beautiful music I had ever heard. It was a classical, formal composition that I did not recognize. She played for a long time. When she was done, she played one last note, discordant, arbitrary, it seemed. The last, deep note resounded for a long time.

  “Was it all right?” she asked.

  “It was beautiful,” I whispered. “I had no idea—”

  “You thought I wouldn’t be any good?”

  “Oh, I knew you could play. But that was not ordinary playing.”

  “Mr. Farrar says I can be very good, but he says I’ll have to dedicate my life to it, and give up a lot of things. He has me practicing every single day. Not five days a week, and not when I feel like it. Every day.”

  “It shows.”

  “Thank you, Peter. I care about your opinion. Actually, Mr. Farrar quotes a famous music teacher named Suzuki. You don’t have to practice every day. Only on the days you eat.” As she did so often, she changed the subject at once. “Let’s go play catch.”

  “I don’t have a glove.”

  “I wish Mead would come back.”

  She left the room, and came back with two gloves and a scuffed-up softball.

  We stood in the backyard, tossing the ball back and forth. After a few tosses, Lani whipped the ball hard, stinging my hand. She buzzed the ball through the air in that underhand way softball pitchers use, and the ball arrived before I could see it.

  I lobbed the ball back overhand until she complained, and then I threw it back still overhand, but with more power.

  “All right!” she said, and she meant not just my throws, but everything, was all right as far as she was concerned.

  A throw jammed my finger.

  She was at my side at once. “Sorry,” she said.

  “It was my own clumsiness.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “My clumsiness?”

  “The problem with softball. If I damage a finger, it could hurt my piano playing.”

  On my way home, the One Stop was empty, except for a very elderly man behind the counter, reading a newspaper. I bought a jug of red wine. One Stop is a store where they don’t have twenty of everything, like a supermarket. They have one or two cans of cat food, one box of Brillo pads. The store is mostly empty, vacant shelves and worn wooden floors. But they have TV Guides, potato chips, and wine in quantity.

  The red wine dissolved that place in me that was Mead. The dead, still-living thing.

  And the fear and the guilt that surrounded it, an ugly aura, a puddle of light.

  11

  Ted looked up from a glittering locomotive he held in his hands. “Peter,” he said. “This is a piece of work.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes. Four hundred and fifty dollars. It had better be beautiful.”

  “When will you be ready to use it?”

  “I don’t know. Months from now, I suppose.” He turned to the soldering iron at his elbow. “When I retired, I told myself that I would spend most of my time down here with my trains. I told myself that I’d probably be bored stiff after a month or two, but that I’d try it out and see. And you know what? I’m not bored at all.”

  He held the soldering iron, a long, dark pencil, away from the light on the workbench. It glowed when it was held into the darkness, and a satisfied look came over Ted as he put the iron back down on its holder. He put the locomotive into a box lined with crumpled tissue paper and uncoiled a loop of solder. “Of course, my wife thought I was crazy, years ago, when I bought my first set. Maybe she still thinks I’m crazy.”

  He used a pincher to snip off a length of the lead-colored wire. “I’m rewiring the whole thing. Making it all new.” He touched the soldering pencil to the lead and the scent of solder touched me, metallic and pure, then a quiet sizzle.

  “Look over against the wall. Go ahead and pick it up.” Ted looked away, then looked back. “Carefully.”

  I stepped in to the shadows and stood beside a range of mountains, w
ith pine trees struggling and failing at the treeline, and snow taking over from there, up to the peaks.

  “Go ahead. Pick it up.”

  I stooped and picked up the mountains. They were not heavy, and holding them up to the light from the workbench, I felt like a god; I felt the silliness of the entire enterprise of making toy mountains, and the beauty of it.

  Later, as my mother was getting dressed, she pulled at an earlobe and found a hole in it with the point of an earring. It was the expensive set a worldly and overweight boyfriend had given her a couple of Christmases ago, a urine-colored gem. It was Russian topaz, although my mother called it beryl over the phone to one of her friends. I had done some reading about the neosilicates, in the days when I had an interest in books and new information. I guess you could say, before I started to take a real interest in drinking. I believed my mother didn’t know the full value of what she had.

  I knew it was wrong, and I knew I could never go through with it but I saw the topaz and thought: money. Money, so I can run away. The plan was simple, even when I knew I could never carry it through. I would steal the topaz, and sell it to one of the criminals—one of the elegant, sophisticated, dangerous students on campus.

  I had, of course, nowhere to run, and I would not have left under the best of circumstances. I had to stay where I was to take care of Mead, and Mead’s parents. But the mind is a busy monkey, and never rests. It makes up plans the way bored hands toy with clay, first one shape, then another.

  “I’m going out,” my mother said.

  “Obviously.”

  “I got a new job today. I’m going to be selling coffee machines to offices. You didn’t know I had a new job, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t even know you were looking. I mean, seriously looking.”

  “We both live in our own worlds. Mother and son, in the same house, but on different planets. I’ve sold a lot of things in my life. I have a knack for it. Remember last year I sold copiers? Until the sales force got cut back. I set a sales record for the month of February.”

  I remembered. We had gone out to dinner, and I had eaten lobster for the first time.

  “And February’s not the greatest month for business, usually. We could survive on alimony,” she continued. “But I don’t want to just survive. Besides, I have some pride.”

  Sometimes I didn’t like my mother, but I’ll say one thing for her: she does have pride. “So you’ll be able to set records,” I said, “selling coffee machines.”

  “That’s right. Coffee machines and dried soups. And coffee, of course, and tea.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “I can’t tell when you’re sarcastic anymore. I’ve lost touch with you completely.”

  “I mean it—congratulations. Really.”

  She picked up an eyebrow pencil, a worn-out stub. “I thought my life would be different than this. I thought it would make sense. Of course, I’m proud of how I’ve made it—of how we both have made it, you and me.”

  I smiled. It was rare that she would talk about herself, and talk about me, in a thoughtful way.

  “Sometimes I feel mean,” she said. “It’s because I’m tired. Sometimes I feel tired the first thing in the morning, and tired all through the day, and then I can’t sleep at night. And it all starts over again.”

  Perhaps she was simply trying to make me feel guilty. It certainly worked. If she knew the truth about me, it would kill her.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be back. Very late.” She fluffed her auburn hair with both hands. “What’s in the bag?”

  I rolled it tight, so she couldn’t see into it, but told the truth. “Paints. Colored pencils. I thought I might do some drawing.”

  “I used to think you’d be an artist. A person with talent. And drive. A person with a lot of drive.”

  “I don’t have much drive.”

  She looked at me, almost a Lani-quality stare for a moment. “I worry about you.”

  “No need to worry. No problems here.”

  “You spend a lot of time with Lani. What’s she like?”

  “She’s a good friend.”

  “So is Mead, and you know I’ve never quite liked him. Too quick on his feet. He always looks like he’s about to disappear.”

  “Lani is a good person.”

  “I wonder. You know I’m not prejudiced. But I wonder what sort of person Lani is.”

  “You don’t like her because she’s black.”

  She threw down her eyebrow pencil, and it skittered along the counter. “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “Lani is the best person I know. She’s an athlete. And a pianist. And she’s brave, and she cares about people. She’s a good person, maybe the kindest person I know.” I would have fought a shark to protect Lani at that moment.

  “I hope so. Because you know something, Peter? I’m worried. About you. Sometimes I think there’s something very wrong.”

  12

  That night there was the smell. Faint, so subtle it might have been only in my mind. After all, Mead was hidden in a place that was cool, nearly cold. But real or not, with every breath, I knew what I had done.

  I could sleep only if I drank, and every morning I felt very bad. My hands trembled, and I had a headache like a vibrating fissure down my cranium, into my spine.

  But when I drank, I could begin to forget what had happened, and what was happening. I knew that every day Mead’s father did not know about his son was another day he could continue to live. If Angela did not have a bottle of the expensive booze for me in the afternoon, I would buy a bottle of whatever seemed right from the One Stop. I began to avoid plain wine, and stick to the fortified wines. Even when I was sober, I could feel the alcohol in me, making my not-drunk hours just the shadow of being intoxicated.

  One morning, someone was stabbed on the steps outside Harding. There were quick, hissed obscenities, a sudden tangle of bodies, and then everyone ran. Everyone but me, and a guy I did not recognize. I was too hung over to function quickly, despite the two fingers of scotch I had swallowed to ease me into the day.

  “They stabbed me! They stabbed me. I’ve been stabbed,” he said. And it seemed impossible that someone who was hurt would be able to speak so calmly. He looked right at me with an expression of mild surprise, and annoyance. “You better call me a doctor because I’m going to die.”

  His shirtfront was glistening with scarlet. It was too red—nothing was that red, and it was sudden. “Don’t worry,” I said, like a talking piece of wood, awkward and barely articulate. “Don’t worry. Someone will call the police.”

  “I don’t want any police. I’m dying.”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  “I’m going to be nothing if you just stand there like that.”

  But then the crowd closed in, and Mr. Lindner was there, speaking in a quiet voice, calling for a blanket. A campus security man was there, his radio antenna wagging into the air, and I knew that authorities would take charge.

  For some reason I was hoping to see Inspector Ng, but instead it was a policeman in a uniform, a notebook on his knee, and black ballpoint pen in his hand, writing nothing.

  Mr. Tyler assured me that I could say whatever I knew. “There won’t be any harm to you,” he said. “No harm at all, so don’t worry. You can speak in utter confidence, Peter, as I know you will.”

  “Just tell us what you saw,” said the policeman, perhaps a little irritated with Mr. Tyler.

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Everyone’s worried about reprisals,” said Mr. Tyler. “It’s hard to blame them.”

  “No, honestly. It was all confused. I didn’t know any of the people—”

  “You recognized none of them?” the policeman asked.

  “I didn’t see hardly any of them. The one who got stabbed—I don’t know who he was. If I knew who did it, I’d tell you. I don’t care what happens to me.” I meant this. I didn’t have anything to lose if someone emptied a twenty-t
wo into my head. “But I didn’t see anything. It happened too fast, and I wasn’t paying attention.”

  The policeman nodded, and seemed to understand. “If you remember anything, let us know.”

  “It all happened so fast—”

  “Witnesses aren’t always reliable anyway,” he said, as though doubting my ability to tell night from day, no doubt recognizing me as yet another teenage zombie. I must have smelled like a distillery. But at least his voice was kind. You feel grateful if the police treat you with the least amount of courtesy.

  They interviewed a dozen other people, and everyone knew zero. Some of the know-nothings probably knew what had happened, but people looked at me with respect, as though I had refused to tell what I had seen.

  “This is insane,” I told Lani as we rode home on the bus. “They admire me because I’m protecting someone probably no one knows anyway.”

  “It’s just drugs,” she said. “It’s just drug money. It has nothing to do with us. Are you upset at what you saw?”

  “I didn’t see anything.” But in fact, I was shaken. All day, I had imagined the cherry jam on the guy’s shirt.

  “There’s too much violence in the world,” she said, looking into my eyes. “Try not to be upset.”

  I got off the bus at my usual stop, and did not see him until I nearly ran into him. Even then, I did not know who it was, although he obviously knew me.

  “I expected you to be taller by now,” said a man with a military haircut, and a square jaw. He had broad shoulders, and wore a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and dark slacks, a look I associate with narcotics detectives.

  “I expected you to be better looking,” I said, but I didn’t know yet who it was.

  “We have to talk.”

  I knew then who it was.

  “Actually, you’re looking good, Jack. I guess military school is just the thing for you. You look like a linebacker.”

  “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” He motioned with his head. “Let’s cross the street.”

  His words were friendly, but his manner made it hard to argue. I had no choice. Jack had always been mean. Now he looked much older, and more like a drill sergeant than a football player. His neck was beefy, and his jaw muscles bunched like biceps as he chewed gum, or maybe a bite out of someone he had taken on the way to meet me. I felt tired and empty, and I wanted a drink.