by Dale Peck
The old man and the stranger are still a good twenty yards away when the old man turns and reels toward the boy. His legs and arms make motions like the spokes of a rimless wheel, and he is shouting,
I won’t let her send him away! Not my boy! Not my firstborn son! Not again!
He jerks right past the boy without seeming to see him, his doddering gait half step and half slide on the slick grade, and it seems pure chance that one of his flailing hands catches hold of the door handle, a veritable miracle that he is able to crack it open. The shotgun sound is like an echo of itself in the quiet air, and the boy whips his head from side to side as if he can find the original source. He is in the back of the house now. From this angle he sees that it is actually L-shaped. He can’t see the farmhouse across the street, the mountain twenty miles to the south. He sees only a bulbous clump of gray-green evergreens and the tin-domed silo and the two barns and a patch of leafless woods at the top of the hill and then a big field studded with black-and-white and butter-brown cows. When the truck coughs into life one of the cows looks up from whatever thin strands it is pulling from the ground, looks first at the truck and then at the boy and then drops its head again and roots around for more grass—green grass, the boy can see, even from this distance. It is the middle of January and thin streaks of snow paint zebra stripes on soil hard as a city sidewalk, but the grass that grows from that soil is still green, and by the time the boy turns back to the truck it has backed out of the driveway, narrowly missing what looks like a fencepost with some kind of placard mounted atop it. The truck would have gone into the ditch on the far side of the road had there not been a tree there. Instead something glass breaks, a taillight that is not already broken perhaps, and when the old man shifts into first the boy hears first the transmission’s grind and then the glass as it falls onto the road. The truck goes so slowly that had he wanted to the boy could have run after it, could probably have caught it even, even with his numb feet. But he just stands there swaying, watching the truck recede as if one of them, the truck or the boy, is on an ice floe borne away from the shore by a half-frozen current. By the time the truck disappears over the hill the stranger has walked down from the barns and walked on by. There is smoke coming from a chimney on the left wall of the house and the stranger’s pitchfork makes a metallic ping each time it strikes the frozen ground.
Feeling floods into the boy’s feet then, as if a pot of pasta water had tipped off the stove and spilled over them. He reels, bites back a cry of pain; catches his breath and catches his balance.
Uncle Wallace? he says to the thin brown back retreating down the hill.
The stranger doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn around.
Get my hat, Dale, he says. At the door he pauses to look the boy up and down, and then he shakes his head one more time. In the failing light his scalp looks white and cold.
Don’t forget your shoes, he says, and walks into the house.
2
It is as dark as it can get now, and cold. It’s not like the sun’s gone down. It’s like the light has frozen in space on its way here, leaving the boy trapped on the frozen plain of this unfamiliar bed.
This was your cousin Edith’s bed.
It seemed to him that his uncle’s wife, Bessie—Aunt Bessie—had fussed over the sheets. She’d stretched them taut across the mattress, smoothed out the wrinkles with her palm as though he weren’t going to pull them back five minutes after she finished. She worked in silence after that one line though, until the boy realized it was his turn to say something.
I have a sister—
His voice cracked and squeaked into the little slope-ceilinged room. There is a slope to the loft’s ceiling as well, on Long Island, but nothing like this steep pitch, which comes to within a couple of feet of the floor on one side of the room. He’d had to duck down to cross to the other side of the bed from Aunt Bessie.
The boy cleared his throat, tried again.
A sister named Edith. Louder: Edi.
In the dim room, illuminated by a single dusty lamp beside the bed, the multicolored squares of the quilt Aunt Bessie fluffed over the sheets seemed to spill out in a patternless yet intricate arrangement that hinted at some as-yet-unseen order, like the twilight stars before the constellations become fully visible. Aunt Bessie turned the top of the quilt down over the nearly featherless pillow, gave it a little plump, then straightened up and looked at him. The expression on her face wasn’t inscrutable, but so unfamiliar as to seem that way. No one—especially not an adult, and especially not a woman—had ever looked at him with pity before.
You have a cousin named Edi too. A smile seamed her face, thin but genuine. Edith. Goodnight Dale.
And it’s not like he’s never had a bed to himself, a bedroom, although it takes a series of events as rare and complicated as a planetary alignment to empty the crowded house on Long Island of father, mother, seven brothers and sisters. The old man on a bender somewhere, his mother pulling second shift, Gregory and Lance at daycare. All three of the girls off at friends’ houses, Jimmy knocking about the Pine Barrens collecting bird skulls or redeemable bottles or—if he can find him—the old man and what’s left of his pay, Duke doing whatever it is Duke does to keep clear of the old man’s fists. If on top of all this the boy doesn’t have to go in to Slaussen’s—and if he can find a way to make it past Robert Sampson and Bruce St. John and Vinnie Grasso without getting dragged into the Barrens himself—then he will round the corner from school and walk into an empty house, and even if he’s not tired he will climb the ladder to the loft and stretch his limbs across the pushed-together twin mattresses that make up the boys’ bed and stare at the canted underside of the roof as though the silver nailpoints pushing through it were the uncurtained stars in the sky. He knows from listening to his parents that this is what they mean by peace and quiet, but to him the house, empty, just feels odd, unnatural even, uncomfortable. With so much space on the bed he finds himself afraid of rolling over and falling off the edge; and if he imagines the scene from the point of view of the nails then what he pictures reminds him of a piece of driftwood washed ashore, or the last cornflake in a bowl of milk. And so he lies on the empty bed, not to rest but to wait, for his siblings to spill back into the house like a second helping of cereal. But no noisy horde is going to pour into this room. The thin quilt does little to quell the cold, even its illusion of stars extinguished with the bedside light.
Although a solid wall—paper and plaster over a net of lathe and studs—separates the boy from his uncle and Aunt Bessie, it’s not much thicker than the curtain that cordons off his parents’ bed at home, and he can hear them talking, their headboard pushed up against his. But unlike his parents, his uncle and Aunt Bessie don’t shout, and he has to concentrate to hear what they’re saying.
It’s not right Wallace. Dropping off his own son like that, no warning to you or the boy. It’s not right.
The boy can’t make out his uncle’s reply. It could be a grunt, or just the creak of wooden bed rails.
I mean, the expense. A boy that age costs money, and this farm—Aunt Bessie’s voice disappears a moment, then resumes. And we’re not young anymore, we both raised children and aren’t exactly at an age to start over again. We’re not even—
Another grunt, or creak.
I mean, I made him pot roast, fixed up Edith’s bed for him. Now what am I supposed to—another fade, longer this time, and then—into town tomorrow? Just drop him off at school?
This time the boy can make out a few of his uncle’s words.
Tomorrow’s Sunday Bess.
Well Monday then. Aunt Bessie’s voice gets louder, clearer. Am I supposed to take the boy to school on Monday? Am I supposed to do that every day until he graduates? How old is he anyway?
Looks about ten, eleven, to me, his uncle says. Though he speaks quietly, there is a clarity to his voice, a fullness to the tone; the boy isn’t sure, but he thinks his uncle actually sounds amused. But ten! The boy b
ridles with indignation. Anyway, his uncle continues, I think it’s a week or two before the winter break ends. After that he can catch the bus right here on 38. If he stays I mean.
If he stays. The idea is sinking in. The old man didn’t just leave him here: he sent him here. He wants him to stay, with these voices and the people they belong to. This bed, this house, those, those cows outside. If he stays they will become his life. His new life.
If he goes back to Long Island there will also be two more weeks of vacation—two more weeks of dodging his mother when he’s not pulling twelve-hour days at the market, but two weeks also of blessed freedom from the boys who decided three years ago to make the one-block journey to and from school the most perilous four hundred steps of the boy’s life. Just thinking about that has his legs twitching under the quilt, his hands balled into fists. Fight or flight. That’s what they call it in school. The instinct to save yourself by whatever means necessary, fleeing your assailant, or beating him into the ground. At school they teach you about the animal roots of human behavior but they still can’t explain why three bullies have elected him their personal whipping boy, and beaten him up every single school day for the past three years.
I think Ethel was going to send him to military school, his uncle says now. I think that’s why Lloyd brung him up.
And what kind of boy is it that he’s left with us? A boy who would do something so heinous his own mother would send him away? Is that the kind of boy we want living with us? Some hoodlum in the making?
At the mention of his mother, the boy’s fists ball even more tightly, until he can feel his pulse in his fingertips. Although he didn’t know until this morning that she wanted to send him away, he does know what he’s done. Knows, at any rate, why she would want to be rid of him.
Well Bess, he hears his uncle say. You never met Ethel. Don’t be so quick to judge the boy on that account.
It comes back in a rush: the knotted sticky bark of the pine limb in his hand, the enveloping stink of his father’s coat and hat, the rivulets of sweat running down the back of his neck and spine and into his drawers. Though the room he lies in is cold as an ice cube—a chipped ice cube really, given the ceiling’s slope—he suddenly feels hot, and wants to throw the quilt from his fully clothed body.
It had been the first week of school. This past year? Two years ago? Funny, but he’s not sure. What he is sure of is that on the morning of the first day of school Bruce St. John had held his hands behind his back while Robert Sampson used his stomach as a punching bag, and on the morning of the second day of school he’d encountered Robert Sampson alone and asked him what he was going to do without his buddy to hold his arms behind his back and Robert Sampson had said he was going to use his karate to kick the boy in the ear, and then he had kicked the boy in the ear and later that day, in English, the boy had felt warmth on the side of his cheek and discovered a trail of blood as thick as a pencil running down the line of his jawbone and seeping into his shirt collar. On the third day he’d managed to make it to school unmolested, but that afternoon Vinnie Grasso had chased him into the Pine Barrens, and even though Vinnie is three years older than the boy he never would have caught him if the boy’s shoes hadn’t been too small—which means it was this year, the boy realizes, this past September. The boy’s shoes had pinched his feet, slowing him down, and when Vinnie finally caught the boy he made the boy take off his belt and used it to tie him to a tree, and though the boy struggled to free himself all he managed to do was shake his too-large pants down below his drawers. Vinnie had bowled over laughing at that, held his stomach with one hand and pointed at the boy with the other, and the boy had thought maybe that was all Vinnie was going to do when Vinnie stood up and pulled a switchblade from his pocket and held it to the boy’s throat and told him he was going to have to kill him now, so there wouldn’t be any witnesses. Or maybe he would just cut out his tongue, Vinnie said. Cut out his tongue and cut off his fingers so he couldn’t tell anybody what happened. Couldn’t speak, or hold a stick to write in the sand. Or maybe … and the knife had trailed south past clavicles and ribcage and solar plexus, and the boy started struggling so wildly that his pants fell all the way to his ankles. Vinnie laughed again, laughed for a good five minutes, and in the end all he did was cut open the seams of the boy’s pants pockets. Here hold this for me Dale will you? he said, making the boy take the blade of the knife between his teeth while he pulled the boy’s pants up and stuffed his cuffs into his socks and proceeded to dump handfuls of dirt into the ripped pockets of the boy’s pants, not stopping until both pant legs were about as filled with dirt as the pillow beneath the boy’s head is with feathers. It took the boy a half hour to work his hands free after Vinnie left, and then he’d had no choice but to take his pants off in the Barrens and shake and scrape as much dirt from them and his muddy legs as he could and run all the way to Slaussen’s, where Mr. Krakowski, the produce manager, had docked his pay for being late. He had not paid him anything at all, and because it was too warm for a jacket the boy hadn’t been able to steal any fruit either. He’d tried slipping a handful of walnuts into his pocket, only to have them roll down his pant leg and clatter on the linoleum floor like marbles.
It was the next day that the boy borrowed the old man’s coat and hat. He knew it was a desperate plan, something out of the Little Rascals or a Mickey Rooney movie, but it was all he could think of—there was still a dried crust of mud lining his pants, after all, and a shower of dust fell to the floor when he put his foot down the leg. And his house was on Second Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, Brentwood Elementary just around the corner on First between Fifth and Sixth: the only choice he had concerning his route was whether to walk on the side of the street where Robert Sampson and Bruce St. John and Vinnie Grasso hung out virtually every morning and afternoon, or walk on the opposite side of the street and hope that a school bus would run them down when they came after him, which hadn’t happened yet.
The coat reached to his ankles, the hat sat all the way down on his ears like Ed’s on The Honeymooners, and both radiated the old man’s powerful odor—not just the smell of sour food but the ammoniac aroma of metabolized alcohol. Though they hadn’t been worn since the previous winter, both coat and hat reeked of the contents of the old man’s brown bottles so strongly that the boy’s eyes watered when he put them on, and as soon as he stepped into the morning heat his own sweat added itself to the mix. It was the second week of September, and even though it was a little after eight in the morning the sun beat down on his dark woolen cloak.
He veered by the Barrens to grab a stick and complete his disguise. The pine bough clung to its trunk with taffylike persistence, and the effort of twisting it off left his hands covered in pitch and his skin even more wet with sweat. He could feel the mud inside his pants absorbing his body’s secretions; dirty denim adhered to his thighs like a polyester skirt static-clinging to a woman’s pantyhose. At first he just carried the stick in his right hand, used it to tap the ground every other step, but then he realized he needed to lean on it if he wanted to fool anybody. He buttoned up the coat, pulled the hat even further down around his ears. His hobble was so convincing that he actually tripped himself and fell on his face. As he drew close to the corner opposite the school grounds he risked a peek under the brim of the hat—there they were, all three of them, Vinnie Grasso flagrantly smoking on school property—and then he returned his gaze to the point of the stick where it struck the dirt of his neighbors’ lawns. As he leaned into it he remembered Vinnie’s words from the day before about cutting out his tongue so he couldn’t speak. What would he write, the boy wondered, if that was all he could do? Would he write Vinnie’s name, or his own? Kill him, or Save me? If nothing else, he thought, he could always use the stick against them. It wasn’t sissy to use a stick. Not if it was three against one it wasn’t, and one of them Jimmy’s age to boot.
The sleeves of the old man’s coat were so long they slipped down over his ha
nds, making it hard for him to keep a firm grip on the stick. He had to continually push up his right sleeve with his left hand, and each time he did so he was aware of his skin in a way he’d never been before: aware that it was smooth, unspotted, the fingers slim and uncalloused, almost feminine in their youthful delicacy. Terrified his hands were going to give him away, he shoved his left into the ripped pocket of his jeans, rubbed it in the film of mud there, then switched his grip on the stick and did the same thing with his right. Not much came out—it felt worse than it looked—but what did come out looked remarkably like the liver spots that covered the backs of Grandma Dundas’s hands.
