by Jessie Haas
They settled in around the table. His mother took a leg of chicken.
“This is warm!”
“We been … pickin’ on it all afternoon,” her husband said.
“So how’s Carrie?” Phillip asked again.
His mother sighed. “Oh, she’s … okay, really. She’s going to be okay in a while.”
“Well, what happened?”
“Oh, he just left her a note, saying he thought it would be best if they stopped seeing each other. Out of a clear blue sky, apparently. And that night one of her friends overheard him at the student center, explaining to another girl how his former girlfriend just couldn’t be there for him. What makes her mad, of course, is that that’s all she did do, and he dumped her when she tried to make it work both ways.”
“So she’s mad,” said Phillip’s father. “Good.”
“Yes. She doesn’t want him back. But she wants—oh, she felt special, and needed, and loved. She wants to be loved right now.”
“Tell her to come home!”
“She’ll be home at Thanksgiving, Carl, but she can’t get back before then. Vivian will help.”
“How is Vivian?”
Phillip listened to his mother tell the news, thinking that the trip had changed her. Maybe it was just tiredness, but she seemed calmer, at once resigned and capable. He liked the way she left the crumbs and little daubs of food on the table and went into the living room with her husband, pushed a couple of pillows onto the floor, and put her feet up. Thea jumped onto her stomach.
“We had company this morning,” his father began. He sat a little sideways in his chair to look at her. They were both changed.
And this conversation was for them. Phillip didn’t belong in it. He slipped off to his own room, leaving the door ajar. Only a low murmur of voices reached him, an occasional cough.
It’s okay, he thought. I’m a teenager. I’m not supposed to talk with my parents.
And it was okay. He had a tiny hurt feeling in his chest, though, and he was somewhat lonely. He thought of going out and walking up to the playground. Maybe Kris would be there.
But he was really too tired. He’d awakened at three this morning, and he felt as if the cold had gotten into his bones in a new way. It made him feel fuzzy all over and lazier than he was lonely. He took out his English paper again and sat looking at the sun sign.
“A ballad,” the teacher had told them. An easy rhyme scheme. Tell a story. Phillip decided a factual account of this little symbol really wouldn’t do. But he could see it on the back of some motorcyclist’s jacket, instead of a Confederate flag, or as the banner of a brave knight’s little band of men. Yes, a knight.
The knight battled for Beauty in Strange Forms and won the respect of all. Unfortunately his ladylove could not bring herself to be identified with a pennant of such lowly origins. The knight was at a crossroads—
Suddenly Phillip became aware of raised voices.
“I’d like to,” his father was saying. “I’m not used to a … house where there’s only … people to think about. I want … more going on. I want Phillip to … have a dog, if he wants, and you to have ducks. [Cough] I’d like … to have a sow, and … feed her mash, and scratch her back with the paddle. Free-graze her, like we used to. Raise piglets—” His voice had begun to hurry and grow faint, and now he coughed hard.
Phillip heard a pause that was full of consternation, and then his mother said, “Who is this woman?” Then the level of their voices subsided, and Phillip couldn’t hear any more.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Monday the school hummed with excitement. Obnoxious people achieved new heights, and teachers came down on them with a crisp authority rare this late in the term. Paper airplanes and spitballs flew. Phillip remembered Thea that morning, racing around the frozen yard with her tail kinked, dashing two feet up a crab apple tree and clinging there, glaring at him wildly. Definitely the weather was about to change. He had felt it himself. He’d looked at his sneakers that morning and shivered and put on his leather work boots instead.
In English class the teacher’s eye ran nervously down his ballad, flinching visibly from the sun symbol that decorated every third verse. Phillip remembered he was a suicide risk.
It was hard to know how to handle this. He felt shy and dropped his eyes whenever the teacher looked his way, with her gaze that was meant to pierce and measure. He felt like giggling. He considered the probable effect of melancholy expressions and bold, cheeky grins and in the end made no response to her at all. That was probably the worst thing he could do. “Withdrawn,” she would write in red felt tip in his folder.
After English he attended history. He hadn’t meant to, but as he was approaching the big doors, he caught Mr. Pilewski’s eye. Instead of going outdoors, he merely looked at the sky for a moment and turned away.
“Going to snow?” Mr. Pilewski asked. Phillip shrugged. He thought he saw a look of compassion on Mr. Pilewski’s face, a tolerance and an alertness. The man knew something. What?
He was late for history but was allowed to slide into a seat without remark. On Mr. Blackman’s face, too, very briefly, was the look of concern. Phillip flushed and sat staring at his notebook, missing almost everything about the Articles of Confederation.
This would have to stop.
Obviously the word had gone out. Maybe there had even been some sort of conference about him. He was visible now, and being watched, not with the hostility he’d imagined but with compassion, which was much worse. He had to be normal again. He had to fit in, so they would stop looking at him.
The bell rang, and it was time for lunch. Phillip evaded Kris by visiting the bathroom and then slipped out the nearest unattended door.
The air was cold and wet, the day gray. The only brightness was the ground, covered with fallen leaves. When he stopped at the farm overlook, the sky seemed high and the wrinkled clouds absolutely still. Two crows flapped across, their wings heavy. It seemed to take them a long time to cross the farm basin.
With a shiver Phillip turned away, shrugging into his bandanna vest as he started up the hill.
Today the kittens were on the doorstep, huddled together against the side of the house. They looked up at him with wide, still eyes, too cold to play. Too cold to move. He picked them up, and like little frozen lizards, they lay still in the crook of his arm, until his warmth penetrated and they started to purr.
They were still okay. They were healthy. But what fun was he getting out of them? What fun were they getting out of kittenhood?
He sat on the step and held them for a while. Looking down at their faces, he noticed how one kitten always met his eyes, with a look of recognition, while the other only looked at its brother or out at the world. This was how he could tell them apart, and he knew that he already loved the one that looked at him and respected the other for its determined catness.
Not all alike, he thought to Dr. Franklin.
“Well, you guys must be hungry,” he said. The kittens tensed in his arms. They were looking beyond him, listening hard. By the time he caught on and turned the way they were looking, he heard the crashes, too.
Someone running, leaping recklessly down the slope on the other side of the brook, lemon-colored shirt bright in the brown woods, pale hair lifted in the wind of running. Phillip was disoriented and distracted, as the independent kitten leaped out of his arms, spitting—but it was Kris, now splashing through the brook in her sneakers.
“Quick!” she gasped, no louder than a whisper. “They’re coming!”
As Phillip gaped, she snatched up the kitten from the ground, closing it firmly in the strong cage of her hands.
“Who?”
“Peabody and Pilewski. Hurry!” She headed back across the brook and up the bare slope beyond. There was no cover, and Phillip followed dazedly, wondering how far they would have to run.
But partway up the hill a large tree had fallen, and Kris dropped out of sight behind it. Phillip found her flat on
her back, gulping huge breaths of air and trying to still the squirming kitten. He dropped beside her and noticed for the first time that his own kitten was digging in its claws. Bright drops of blood beaded up on the backs of his hands.
“On the road,” Kris said, when she had the breath to spare. “They should just about be here.”
Several minutes passed. The kittens’ ruffled feathers were smoothed, and Kris was breathing quietly, when Phillip began to hear a rhythmic tramping on the road. It sounded incredibly loud and went on for some time before the two men appeared.
They seemed unsurprised to find a house here, walked clumsily and matter-of-factly down to the door, their shoes trampling the weeds and the patch of sand where the sun sign was. They pushed the door open without knocking and went inside.
Now Phillip began to hear voices. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. In a moment Mr. Pilewski appeared in the back doorway, completely filling it. He looked keenly down the brook and up the slope, as alert and formidable as a Polish knight. Phillip disciplined his first reaction and did not duck, and evidently the top half of his head passed for a section of tree trunk. Mr. Pilewski turned back to the kitchen. “Nothing,” he said.
Their voices went on inside for a moment more, and then both came out into the yard again. Mr. Peabody put his hands on his hips and stood looking around, seeming a trifle uncomfortable at such an expanse of space.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said.
Mr. Pilewski shook his head. “Not much point. Besides, it’s deer season.”
“Oh!” Mr. Peabody looked around nervously. “Isn’t this land posted?”
“Not that I know of.”
“So near the school—and I know that boy doesn’t have an orange jacket!”
Mr. Pilewski shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t think we know a goddamned thing about him. I’m not even sure he’s been here.”
“Well, the ax, all that wood—”
“Maybe somebody from the farm. Maybe a hunter.”
“Oh.” Mr. Peabody turned, frowning. One of the kittens suddenly let out a loud cry. Neither man seemed to notice. “Well, it was worth a try,” Mr. Peabody said. “You didn’t get anything from Madeline Rossi?”
Mr. Pilewski shook his head as they started up the slope through the weeds. “I just asked if he worked there, and she said he did. I think …” His words were muffled by distance.
Phillip rested his cheek against the log. He listened to their footsteps dying away and to the loud clamor of the brook. He felt a little sick, until Kris turned to him, her eyes bright with triumph.
“They don’t know anything!” she said.
“They know I’ve been skipping.”
“Not a big deal. This is nothing, compared with what some people get away with!”
But I’m not that kind of person, Phillip thought. “What will they do?”
“You’ll get a couple warnings, but they definitely won’t suspend you. Just say you had to get away and think—”
“Anyway,” said Phillip, sitting up straight and letting the kitten go, “what are you doing here?”
She glanced away, watched the kittens prowl along the log. “I … followed you, Monday. Just to make sure—”
“Make sure what?”
She flushed. “Make sure you weren’t doing drugs! Make sure you weren’t gonna kill yourself!”
“Why did you think—”
“Oh, come on, Phillip! When people start acting weird, you think about it! I knew I’d feel like a jerk reading your obituary, so I found out! And I haven’t followed you since, okay? I really couldn’t care less what you do, especially if you don’t want to tell me—”
She broke off and got to her feet. Phillip sat staring up at her, not knowing what to say.
“I have to get back,” she said.
“Are you going to be in trouble?”
“No.”
She looked tall and remote, closed off from him. A bad way to end the adventure. It had been an adventure, Phillip realized. He felt the triumph rising in him. So he’d been too stunned to enjoy it at the time. So what? Now it was there to think about.
“Hey,” he said, stopping her as she turned. “Thanks. How did you know they were coming?”
“It was a little obvious, the way you snuck off—”
“It was?”
“Well, they were watching. And so was I. I saw them follow you.”
“Shit.” The sense of adventure rapidly paled. “Now what do I do?”
Kris hunkered down and picked up a twig, rustling it in the leaves to catch the kittens’ attention. After a moment’s thought she said, “It might work out. They never caught you. They’ll want to find out what you’re up to. So they’ll watch, and if you don’t come here for a while, they’ll forget about it.”
“Yeah, but …” He stopped, eyes on the kittens as they stalked the twig. Up here, away from the comparative shelter of the hollow, they seemed even smaller and more domestic.
“You’d have to do something soon anyway,” Kris said. “It’s getting so cold.”
“Mmm.” Phillip watched the pencil-point tails of the kittens. Barn cats get along okay, he was thinking, but a barn was more shelter than the gray house. Besides, when snow came, he would leave an unmistakable trail.
But he liked coming every day. It wasn’t what he’d intended, it wasn’t all the gray house meant to him, but he missed chores. Like his father, he needed something to do, something to care for.… He looked up at Kris, who was frowning at him, and he wished he had something simple and clear to say to her. She was on the verge of getting mad again, and he didn’t know how to stop it—
“I can’t take them,” she said abruptly. “I figured I would, but now with this greyhound thing—” She was not angry, only gruff with embarrassed sympathy. None of us know a goddamned thing about one another, Mr. Pilewski.…
“Something’ll work out,” he said. “I haven’t fed them yet. Want to come down and see?”
She looked down at the gray house, in all its beautiful loneliness, and shook her head; reluctantly, he thought. She was shivering, and her nose was red. “No, I really have to get back. Are you coming?”
Phillip shook his head, smiling. “Can’t face it. Tomorrow. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“All right.” She punched his arm lightly and turned away.
At the top of the slope she turned again. “What did you name them anyway? Bonnie and Clyde, or Frank and Jesse?”
Phillip gaped. She grinned and waved, and disappeared over the top of the ridge.
Monday. Chicken sandwich day. She must have had a hard time not laughing.
He collected the kittens and headed toward the house.
They had come here so directly. Was it a known place? Somewhere to smoke pot and make out?
That must be rare, Phillip thought. There was no graffiti scratched anywhere, no litter. Most people wouldn’t come so far.
Big tracks crossed the patch of sand, which he had never stepped on. He thought the sun sign would be obliterated, but after a moment he found it between two footprints, intact. That made him feel a little better.
Inside nothing seemed to be touched, but the space felt invaded. It seemed shabby and dreary now since their eyes had looked at it: Mr. Peabody’s kindly, piercing stare, the glittering blue-eyed gaze of Mr. Pilewski.
The kittens didn’t notice. They were happy to eat. Phillip stood watching. He thought he should take them back now.
What stopped him was the thought of Dr. Rossi’s eyes. They would look disappointed and saddened, because once again the kittens would be her problem.
Besides, it would be a pain carrying them.
Tomorrow, then. He would bring his bike. And between now and then he would have figured out what to do with them.
The sky was wrinkled like a washboard, high and still, and as Phillip crossed the cornfield, he felt like an ant: small, slow. He didn’t like the feeling of the air, the chill
, the sense almost of vibration.
The tiny pellets of snow had been falling for several minutes before he noticed them. At last one bounced off his coat sleeve, as he stuck out his thumb and a driver stopped for him.
Dry as sand, the snow collected against the curb outside the clinic in a half inch dune. Otherwise the pavement was bare. A searching wind had come up. Phillip hurried toward the side door.
A woman was going in ahead of him, with an old Labrador on a leash. The dog paused beside the dead marigolds and cocked its leg. Glancing down a second later, Phillip saw brilliant splashes of red across the faded browns and yellows. He frowned, feeling stupid. Hadn’t the red faded out of the marigolds? There was red on the ground, too.
“Hello, Margaret,” said Dr. Rossi at the door. Only Dr. Rossi’s friends came in the side door and before office hours. The old Lab wagged his tail and trotted heavily inside. His owner let the leash drop and pointed to the red-splashed marigolds.
“I see,” said Dr. Rossi.
“There’s been a little blood in the past two days, but this is much worse.” The woman’s voice was firm and almost casual.
“Well, come inside, and I’ll take a look. Oh, Phillip! Could you help me lift him?”
“Oh, Madeline,” said the owner, “let’s not. He hates the table!”
“All right,” said Dr. Rossi. She knelt beside the old Lab, who wagged again and licked the air near her face. The owner held his collar, and Phillip stood by ready to help, watching Dr. Rossi do the examination.
It was almost a trance. She pressed the fingers of both hands around the rib cage and then almost up inside it, as if she could reach right into the dog and feel each organ. Watching, Phillip felt drawn into the trance as well. He didn’t know what she felt with her hands, but he knew when the dog shifted away from her, when it tensed, and when it didn’t care.
At last she stood up.
“It’s the kidneys, of course. I could take an X ray—”
“Let’s not,” said Margaret. She looked at the dog, and Dr. Rossi looked at her. When Margaret looked up, Dr. Rossi’s eyes slid away again.
