“Your parents?”
“Yes.”
We went through a small town with streetlights. Past an empty brick school, past a cannon with cannonballs pyramided beside it, past a small store with a Pepsi sign out front. Then we were back in darkness on the highway.
I let some air out of my lungs. “Because they don’t know any better,” I said. “Because they don’t know what they are, or how to find out, or what a good person is, or how to find out. So they rely on categories.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean your father probably isn’t sure of whether he’s a good man or not, and he suspects he might not be, and he doesn’t want anyone to find out if he isn’t. But he doesn’t really know how to be a good man, so he goes for the simple rules that someone else told him. It’s easier than thinking, and safer. The other way you have to decide for yourself. You have to come to some conclusions about your own behavior and then you might find that you couldn’t live up to it. So why not go the safe way. Just plug yourself into the acceptable circuitry.”
“I can’t follow all that,” Paul said.
“I don’t blame you,” I said. “Let me try another way. If your father goes around saying he likes ballet, or that you like ballet, then he runs the risk of someone else saying men don’t do that. If that happens, then he has to consider what makes a man, that is, a good man, and he doesn’t know. That scares the shit out of him. Same for your mother. So they stick to the tried and true, the conventions that avoid the question, and whether it makes them happy, it doesn’t make them look over the edge. It doesn’t scare them to death.”
“They don’t seem scared. They seem positive.”
“That’s a clue. Too much positive is either scared or stupid or both. Reality is uncertain. Lot of people need certainty. They look around for the way it’s supposed to be. They get a television-commercial view of the world. Businessmen learn the way businessmen are supposed to be. Professors learn the way professors are supposed to be. Construction workers learn how construction workers are supposed to be. They spend their lives trying to be what they’re supposed to be and being scared they aren’t. Quiet desperation.”
We passed a white clapboard roadside vegetable stand with last year’s signs still up and the empty display tables dour in the momentary headlights, native corn, beans. And then pine woods along the road as the headlight cone moved ahead of us.
“You’re not like that.”
“No. Susan says sometimes in fact I’m too much the other way.”
“Like what?”
“Like I work too hard to thwart people’s expectations.”
“I don’t get it,” Paul said.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “The point is not to get hung up on being what you’re supposed to be. If you can, it’s good to do what pleases you.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.”
“Even now?”
“Yeah.”
CHAPTER 21
We ran five miles in the late May warmth and both of us glistened with sweat when we got back to the cabin. The new cabin was on the verge of beginning to look like something. The concrete pilings had cured. The sills and floor joists were down. The big plywood squares that formed the subflooring were down and trimmed. The composting toilet was in, the stool perched flagrantly on the unadorned subfloor.
“We don’t lift today,” Paul said. His breath was easy.
“No,” I said. I took two pairs of speed gloves off the top of the speed bag strike board and gave one pair to Paul. We went first to the heavy bag. “Go ahead,” I said.
Paul began to hit the bag. He still pushed his punches.
“No,” I said. “Snap the punch. Try to punch through the bag.” Paul punched again. “More shoulder,” I said. “Turn your body and get your shoulder into it more. Turn. Turn. No, don’t loop. You’re hitting with the inside of your clenched hand now, on the upper parts of your fingers. Look.”
I punched the bag. Jab. Jab. Hook. Jab. Jab. Hook. “Try twisting your hand as you hit. Like this, see, and extend.” The bag popped and hopped as I hit it. “Like this. Punch. Extend. Twist. Extend. You try it”
Paul hit the bag again. “Okay. Now keep your feet apart like I told you. Move around it. Shuffle. Don’t walk, shuffle. Feet always the same distance apart. Punch. Left. Left. Right. Right again. Left. Left. Left. Right”
Paul was gasping for breath, “Okay,” I said. “Take a break.” I moved in on the heavy bag and worked combinations for five minutes. Left jab, left hook, overhand right Left jab, left jab, right hook. Then in close and I dug at the body of the bag. Short punches, trying to drive a hole through the bag, keeping the punches no more than six inches. When I stopped I was gasping for breath and my body was slick with perspiration. Paul was just getting his breath back.
“Imagine if the bag punched back,” I said. “Or dodged. Or leaned on you.” I said. “Imagine how tired you’d be then.”
Paul nodded. “The speed bag,” I said, “is easy. And showy. You look good hitting it. It’s useful. But the heavy bag is where the work gets done.” I hit the speed bag, making the bag dance against the backboard. I varied the rhythm, making it sound like dance steps. I whistled the “Garryowen” and hit the bag in concert with it.
“Try it,” I said. “Here. You’ll need this box.” I put a wooden box that tenpenny nails had come in upside-down under the bag. Paul stepped up. “Hit it with the front of your fist, then the side, then the front of the other fist, then the side. Like this. I’ll do it slow.” I did. “Now you do it. Slow.”
Paul had little success. He hit the backboard and bent over red-faced, sucking on the sore knuckles.
The box wobbled as he shifted his weight and he stepped down and kicked it, still holding his knuckles to his mouth, making a wet spot on the glove.
“You’ll probably hit the swivel at least once too,” I said. “That really smarts.”
“I can’t hit it,” he said.
“It’s easy to pick up. You’ll be able to make it bounce pretty good in about a half hour.”
It took more than a half hour, but the bag was showing signs of rhythm when it was time for lunch. We showered first. And, still damp, we sat out on the steps of the cabin and had cheddar cheese with Granny Smith apples, Bartlett pears, some seedless green grapes, and an unsliced loaf of pumpernickel bread. I had beer and so did Paul. Neither of us wore shirts. Both of us were starting to tan and signs of pectoral muscles were beginning to appear on Paul’s chest. He seemed a little taller to me. Did they grow that fast?
“Were you a good fighter?” Paul said.
“Yes.”
“Could you have been champion?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“They’re a different league. I was a good fighter, like I’m a good thinker. But I’m not a genius. Guys like Marciano, Ali, they’re like geniuses. It’s a different category.”
“You ever fight them?”
“No. Best I ever fought was Joe Walcott.”
“Did you win?”
“No.”
“That why you stopped?”
“No. I stopped because it wasn’t fun anymore. Too much graft, too much exploitation. Too many guys like Beau Jack who make millions fighting and end up shining shoes someplace.”
“Could you beat Joe Walcott in a regular fight?”
“You mean not in the ring?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe.”
“Gould you beat Hawk?”
“Maybe.”
I drank some beer. Paul had another piece of cheese and some grapes.
“The thing is,” I said, “anybody can beat anybody in a regular fight, a fight without rules. It matters only what you’re willing to do. I got a gun and Walcott doesn’t and poof. No contest. It doesn’t make too much sense worrying about who can beat who. Too much depends on other factors.”
“I mean a fair fight,” Paul said.
�
��In a ring with gloves and rules, my fight with Walcott wasn’t fair. He was much better. He had to carry me a few rounds to keep the customers from feeling cheated.”
“You know what I mean,” Paul said.
“Yes, but I’m trying to point out that the concept of a fair fight is meaningless. To make the match fair between me and Walcott I should have had a baseball bat. In a regular fight you do what you have to to win. If you’re not willing to, you probably shouldn’t fight”
Paul finished his beer. I finished mine.
“Let’s start on the framing,” I said.
“You can turn on the ball game if you want,” Paul said.
CHAPTER 22
“You want the studs to be sixteen inches on center,” I said, “so that four-by-eight sheating and stuff will fall right. You’ll see when we get the walls up.”
We were building the wall frames on the ground. “When we get them built we’ll set them up on the platform and tie them together,” I said.
“How do you know they’ll fit right?” Paul said.
“I measured.”
“How can you be sure your measurement is right?”
“It usually is. You learn to trust it, why wouldn’t it be right?”
Paul shrugged; a gesture from the past. He began to drive a nail into one of the two-by-four studs. He held the hammer midway up the middle. His index finger was pointed along the handle toward the head. He took small strokes.
“Don’t choke up on the handle,” I said. “Hold it at the end. Don’t stick your finger out. Take a full swing.”
“I can’t hit the nail that way,” he said.
“You’ll learn. Just like you did with the speed bag. But you won’t learn if you do it that way.”
He took a full swing and missed the nail altogether.
“See,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter. Keep at it. In a while it’ll be easy. That way you let the hammer do the work.”
By midafternoon we had three walls studded in. I showed Paul how to cut a length of two-by-four the proper size for a sixteen-inch on-center spacing so he didn’t have to measure each time.
“What about windows?” he said as we started on the fourth wall.
“When we get the walls up, we’ll frame them in, and the doors.”
We were finishing up the fourth wall and getting ready to raise them when Patty Giacomin’s Audi bumped in from the road and parked beside the Bronco.
When Paul saw her he stopped and stared at the car. He was wearing a hammer holster on his belt and a nailing apron tied around his waist His bare upper body was sweaty and speckled with sawdust. There was sawdust in his hair too. As his mother got out of the car he put the hammer in its holster.
Patty Giacomin walked from her car toward us. She was awkward walking in slingback high-heeled shoes over the uncivilized ground.
“Paul,” she said. “It’s time to come home.”
Paul looked at me. There was no expression on his face.
“Hello,” she said to me. “I’ve come to take Paul home.” To Paul she said, “Boy, don’t you look grown-up with your hammer and everything.”
I said, “Things straightened out between you and your husband, are they?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we’ve worked out a good compromise, I think.”
Paul took his hammer out of the holster, turned, knelt beside the wall we were studding, and began to drive a nail into the next stud.
“Paul,” his mother said, “get your things. I want to get back. Spenser, if you’ll bill me, I’ll send you a check.”
I said, “What kind of arrangement have you worked out?”
“With Mel? Oh, I’ve agreed to let Paul stay with him for a while.”
I raised my eyebrows. She smiled. “I know, it seems like such an about-face, doesn’t it?” she said. “But a boy needs a father. If it were a daughter, well, that’s different.”
Paul hammered at the studs, holding four or five nails in his teeth, apparently concentrating entirely on the job.
“Surprising you just thought of that,” I said.
“I suppose I’ve been selfish,” she said.
I folded my arms on my chest and pursed my lips and looked at her face.
“Paul,” she said, “for heaven’s sake stop that damned hammering and get your stuff.”
Paul didn’t look up. I looked at her face some more.
“Paul.” She was impatient.
I said, “Patty. This needs some discussion.”
Her head snapped around, “Now just one minute, mister. I hired you to look out for Paul, that’s all. I don’t need to explain things to you.”
“Clever rhyme,” I said.
“Rhyme?”
“Paul and all. Cute.”
She shook her head shortly. I kept looking at her with my arms folded.
She said, “Why are you doing that?”
I said. “There’s a credibility problem here. I’m trying to figure it out.”
“You mean you don’t believe me?”
“That’s right,” I said. “You been living with Stevie Elegant?”
“I’ve been staying with Stephen, yes.”
“You running out of money to pay me?”
“I’ll pay you what I owe you. Just send me a bill.”
“But you can’t afford to keep paying me.”
“Not forever, of course not, who could?”
“Would you like to keep staying with the disco prince?”
“I don’t see why you have to talk about Stephen that way.”
“Would you?”
“I’m very fond of Stephen, and he cares for me. Yes. I’d like to share his life.”
I nodded. “You want to move in with the spiffy one on a permanent basis. But he won’t take the kid. You can’t keep paying me to baby-sit, so you’re going to ship him off to the old man.”
“It’s not the way you make it sound.”
“So in effect your ex-husband is being asked to do you a favor. Does he know that?”
“I don’t see…”
“He doesn’t, does he? He thinks you’ve just been beaten down and have given up.”
She shrugged.
“What do you suppose he’ll do when he finds out he’s doing you a favor?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s spent the last six months trying to get the kid away from you because he thought you wanted to keep him and you’ve spent the last six months trying to keep him from getting the kid because you thought he wanted him. But he doesn’t and you don’t. When he finds out that you’re glad he’s got the kid he’ll want to give him back. You’ll spend the next six months trying to give him to each other.”
“For God’s sake, Spenser, not in front of Paul.”
“Why not? You do it in front of Paul. Why shouldn’t I talk about it in front of him. Neither one of you is interested in the goddamned kid. Neither one of you wants him. And both of you are so hateful that you’ll use the kid in whatever way is available to hurt the other.”
“That is simply not true,” Patty said. Her voice sounded a little shaky. “You have no right to talk that way to me. Paul is my son and I’ll decide what’s best for him. He’s coming home with me now and he’s going to live with his father.”
Paul had stopped nailing and was kneeling, his head turned toward us, listening. I looked at him. “What do you think, kid?” I said.
He shook his head.
“You want to go?” I said.
“No.”
I looked back at Patty Giacomin.
“Kid doesn’t want to go,” I said.
“Well, he’ll just have to,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Patty said.
“No,” I said. “He’s not going. He’s staying here.”
Patty opened her mouth and closed it. A big, fuzzy, yellow-and-black bumblebee moved in a lazy circle near my head and then planed off in a bi
g looping arch down toward the lake.
“That’s illegal,” Patty said.
I didn’t say anything.
“You can’t take a child away from its parents.”
The bee found no sustenance near the lake and buzzed back, circling around Patty Giacomin, fixing on her perfume. She shrank away from it. I batted it lightly with my open hand and it bounced in the air, staggered, stabilized, and zipped off into the trees.
“I’ll have the police come and get him.”
“We get into a court custody procedure and it will be a mess. I’ll try to prove both of you unfit,” I said. “I bet I can.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
I didn’t say anything. She looked at Paul.
“Will you come?” she said.
He shook his head. She looked at me. “Don’t expect a cent of money from me,” she said. Then she turned and marched back across the uneven leaf mold, wobbling slightly on her inapt shoes, stumbling once as a heel sank into soft earth. She got into the car, started up, yanked it around, and spun the wheels on the dirt road as she drove away.
Paul said, “We only got three studs to go and the last wall is finished.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it. Then we’ll knock off for supper.”
He nodded and began to drive a tenpenny nail into a new white two-by-four. The sound of his mother’s car disappeared. Ours was the only human noise left.
When the last wall was studded we leaned it against its end of the foundation and went and got two beers and sat down on the steps of the old cabin to drink them. The clearing smelled strongly of sawdust and fresh lumber, with a quieter sense of the lake and the forest lurking behind the big smells.
Paul sipped at his beer. Some starlings hopped in the clearing near the new foundation. Two squirrels spiraled up the trunk of a tree, one chasing the other. The distance between them remained the same as if one didn’t want to get away and the other didn’t want to catch it.
“‘Ever will thou love and she be fair,’” I said.
“What?”
I shook my head. “It’s a line from Keats. Those two squirrels made me think of it.”
“What two squirrels?”
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