The Boy With Penny Eyes

by Al Sarrantonio

  "Go on, baby," Jacob said in a soothing voice.

  The next words came out in a sobbing rush. "We looked into the alley and one of the garbage cans near the entranceway was sliding toward the street like something was pushing it. Then it fell over. Danny French was behind it. And he was . . ."

  "Christine, baby—"

  "Maybe I should—" the police officer interrupted.

  "I'll tell him!" Christine shouted. She sobbed, staring up into her father's face. "Daddy, there was a knife stuck into his eye right through the other side of his head!"

  "Oh, God," said Beck, a coldness passing through him as he pulled his daughter closer.

  When Jacob Beck had thanked the policeman and saw him out, he returned to find Mary still standing rigid in the doorway.

  "Tell your father what you told me," she said to Christine.

  Beck went to her, and Christine let him rock her in his arms before she stiffened. When she looked at him, her eyes were hard. "Billy had a fight with Danny French in the school yard today."

  "Christine—"

  "The boy is evil, Jacob," Mary said from her spot in the doorway. Her gaze was level, her voice quiet and assured. "He killed that old man in the park, and he killed Danny French. He killed Allie Kramer. The other mysterious suicides in the paper—he murdered them all. He'll kill us, too."

  She looked at her husband with a calm conviction that turned Beck's insides icy. "Billy Potter is Satan, Jacob." Her eyes were hard as stones when she next spoke.

  "God will tell me what to do."

  23

  Emily Potter made it to Tulsa. At Tulsa, where they had a half-hour stopover, she wandered restlessly from the train station into the sunlight. The sun hurt her eyes. She shaded them with her hand, and walked until she found a main street. Proceeding to one end, she did not find what she was looking for, so she retraced her steps, checking with her eyes the shops across the street, and walked the other way.

  At the near end of the street, near a highway overpass, she found what she sought. Only then did she tell herself that this was what she was looking for. I'll put it away, she thought, and I won't look at it. I'll give it to Reverend Beck.

  There was a little bell over the door that jangled as she went in. For a brief moment she was blinded, her eyes still used to the bright daylight outside. Also, she was confused. It had been a long time.

  But it all came back to her. There were bottles set in familiar rows along one wall. She went to one with a label she knew and lifted it from its shelf and brought it to the counter. She checked her watch. In ten minutes the train would leave.

  The store proprietor seemed in no hurry to wait on her. He was dusting a line of liter Chablis bottles in the back. He hummed to himself. The counter had a green mat on it, the kind that was made of textured rubber so things wouldn't slip off.

  She was about to clear her throat when the proprietor turned and saw her. "Be right with you!" he said brightly. He continued his dusting for a moment longer, then tucked his duster into his belt and shuffled over to the counter. She saw that there was something wrong with his legs—one was shorter than the other and he moved with an unconscious grimace each time he took a step.

  "Just this, please," she said when he had reached the back of the counter, knowing that if she did not say that, he would ask her what else she wanted. He looked like the kind of man who would say that, then go on to the weather and maybe politics before getting around to telling her about a wonderful red wine that had just come in from Uruguay. He looked like the kind of man that went into barbershops and stayed there all day when he wasn't working, talking and talking.

  "You know—" the storekeeper began. She repeated, "Just this, please."

  He shrugged and took her twenty-dollar bill, ringing up the sale on an old wooden cash register. The drawer didn't open, and he clucked and banged the side of it. It still didn't open. She looked at her watch and saw that there were only five minutes until the train left. She didn't want to miss it and be stuck here. She said, "That'll be fine," and took the bottle, tucking it into her shoulder bag. At the doorway, as the little bell tinkled above her, she heard the proprietor call out behind her, "Miss, your change!" as the cash-register drawer opened with an old, muffled ding.

  She went back out into the sunshine, again holding her hand over her eyes. Such a long time, she thought. So long. As she walked briskly toward the train station she felt the hard bottle hitting against her side through the shoulder bag. She took the bottle out and held it tightly under her arm.

  As she got to her seat, the train pulled out. Her back was covered with perspiration. She was mad, because she was sweaty now from rushing and she didn't want to feel that way. She would be uncomfortable now for the rest of the trip, feeling as if she wanted to change.

  When the train had slid into the countryside, she pulled her suitcase down from the overhead rack and opened it. On top was a letter for Billy. She put the bottle deep inside her suitcase, underneath her heavy clothes. It's a present for Reverend Beck, she told herself again, but she knew this was a lie, and as soon as the suitcase was back overhead, she began to think of the bottle.

  This was not the way she had planned it. It had started so well. When Reverend Beck had called her, her heart had leaped, because it seemed that an empty place there, a hollow that had been scooped out over a year ago when Billy left, would be refilled. Her heart had actually leaped in joy, and this, more than even the fact that she now knew where he was and would see him again, that he had been found after disappearing from the foundling home, had filled her with hope. She had thought that if such a call ever came, she would be filled with dread, but she had been filled with happiness and this had told her that her life really was made new.

  She had not had a drink in over a year—since she had awakened one morning a week after Billy left, in a pool of her own vomit, her gums soaked in blood and one leg numb. Almost two hours went by before she was able to crawl to the telephone and speak into it.

  After that, after she had gotten out of the hospital, and, especially, after the therapy they had provided for her, she had vowed never to take another drink. AA meetings had followed, and within five months she was a new person. When word had come that Billy was in a home three states away and that the woman who had taken him in wanted to keep him until she could find a new home for him, she had at first been determined that she would take him home herself and start a new life with him. But something deep within her had reacted with dread, and she knew that if she did that, she would be back on the bottle within a week. So she had said yes to the woman, and Billy was gone from her, and each day she grew stronger.

  And then the second call had come, after he had disappeared from Melinda's home, and this time it wasn't dread but joy she felt. This time she knew she could take him back and be his mother.

  Joy had welled up within her.

  Until she had gotten on the train.

  Then all the doubts had come back to her. As the train pulled out, she had felt a tug in her stomach. It was as if someone was in there with a pair of pliers. She thought that she had made a mistake. Maybe she should have let the Unitarian minister adopt him, like he had vaguely hinted. It had been obvious that the man wanted to keep the boy. But at the time, she had been so sure of what she was doing, of the happiness that had invaded her, that she had told him she would come out immediately to see Billy.

  On the train, the doubts gnawed away at her, slowly, until, about halfway there, all of her confidence was gone. She had begun to think about living with her son again, about Billy's eyes looking at her, that deep void way at the back, his constant, strange silences masking some sort of powerful fury. He was her son, but she was still afraid of him.

  She couldn't back out. She had told Reverend Beck she would be there, Billy knew she would be there, she didn't want to see him again but she did . . .

  And then there was a way out. There, in the train, by the small dirty square window, with clust
ers of fall-bespeckled trees and rows of white and green and brown houses rushing past, as one hand, which had rested on the smoothly worn red vinyl of the seat's armrest for most of the trip, now played absently with her new haircut, the haircut she had gone out to get after that phone call with the minister, when the first blush of her now-fading happiness had still been upon her, as her hand hovered there above her head, full of the thoughts that crowded into her brain—she knew a way out. There was a small hunger deep within her, one that had never gone away, and if she fed it, then all the other fears might disappear, just like they always had. She would not abuse it, this time. She would just let it give her what it had given her at one time, before it got out of hand—a way out, and a dull, pleasing view of her world. She had been drunk when she used to make Billy's sandwiches at lunch, when she cleaned the house on Tuesdays and Thursdays, drunker later when she put something frozen into the oven for their dinner. She had been quietly drunk when Billy went out in the backyard to play, and when he came home from school, she had been able to smile at him, and smile when she bathed him and put him to bed. He had been her little Billy boy. She had smiled because the quiet little face, with the coppery eyes, had, in her drinking dreams, smiled back, called her Mommy, held his hands up to be kissed, begged to be lifted and held close. The face the alcohol showed her made her brave. It made the world into a place she could live in.

  She left the bottle in the suitcase until nightfall. Then the sleeping car's lights dimmed, and what few passengers there were went to sleep. Still, she waited until well past midnight. No one took the train anymore. If she had flown, she would have been there a day earlier, but somewhere in her mind, she had thought that taking the train there, and then back with Billy, would be a pleasant thing to do. It was something she had done once when she was a girl, when she had visited her cousins in Vermont. Now she knew that she had really taken the train because it would give her time to think about what she had in the suitcase.

  The seat beside her had remained empty through the whole trip. She took her bag down from the overhead rack and opened it. Her hand slid under the top layer of underwear and bras, below the more substantial clothing beneath, instantly locating the hard glass of the bottle. She took it out and tucked it in the seat between her and the window. She closed the bag and left it where it was.

  She got up quietly and went to the end of the car. There was a water cooler there, with a dispenser of conical paper cups. She drew the last four of them out and went back to her seat. The train slid into a curve, and she stood still for a moment, feeling the added friction of the clacking wheels as they moved against the track beneath her. Then she sat down.

  Her fingers shook as she pulled the wrap of paper from the top of the bottle. She knew what she was doing. There was no reason for her hand to shake. It was not, she suddenly realized, because she was turning her back on what she had over a year to accomplish—her hand was shaking in anticipation. For a brief moment she wondered if she should have bought a second bottle.

  The first drink went down smoothly. She thought it would burn, her throat was so unused to it, but it was sweet, like maple syrup. She poured another and screwed the cap back on the bottle, tucking it beside her again. She looked out the window. Clackety clack. The night moved by like black water. There was a flow to it. Somewhere out there was morning, waiting to come to her. The train would get in just before six o'clock.

  She looked down and saw that she had already taken the second drink.

  Clackety-clack.

  She saw also that her hand had already unscrewed the cap from the bottle.

  When the sky had brightened to purple, she slipped the empty bottle into her suitcase. The sunrise would be beautiful. She would watch it from her seat, here in the train, and then she would go and see her son again. Suddenly she was crying. She didn't know why. She watched the sun rise, and then the day began with blue sky pushing purple away. The train slowed, then stopped.

  She gathered her bags and put her coat on. She knew now that she had been crying for what she had left behind, the world she could have had if she had said no to seeing Billy again. She weighed the two worlds and found that they were equal. She wanted to sit down and cry some more, but she didn't. The train had stopped and it was time to get off.

  When she stepped down onto the platform, it smelled like morning in autumn in a medium-sized town—the scent of dewed leaves on the ground, of leaves just breaking away from their trees. It was a little cold taste on her tongue. She went into the small station.

  She remembered then that she hadn't even told Reverend Beck when she would be arriving. She had told him the day, and that she would call him when she got in. She looked at the white-faced clock on the wall by the ticket stand: 6:04. It was too early to call. She would wait until eight-thirty or nine.

  She wondered when the liquor stores opened here.

  One other passenger had gotten off with her, an older woman who immediately got into a waiting yellow taxi and was gone. The ticket booth in the station was open, but no one was standing at the small window. She could hear the snap of turning newspaper pages from the booth. There was the vague, pungent smell of coffee, which made her feel sick.

  She sat down on the dark green bench that ran the length of one wall. She stared at the clock: 6:06. A pressure began to build below her stomach. She realized she hadn't gone to the bathroom on the train since four o'clock in the morning. It was at that point that she had known she was lost, because she had smiled at herself in the small, smoke-dirty bathroom mirror on the train, and another face, her old face, had merely stared back at her. She had cried, but then she had gone back to finish the bottle.

  She rose, looking down at her bags and contemplating whether to bring them or not. She thought of going over to the ticket booth and asking the seller to watch them for her, but the hard snap of another page being turned told her that he didn't want to be disturbed.

  The hell with that, she thought, carrying them with her.

  The ladies' room smelled of recently applied disinfectant—a change from the train bathroom, which had smelled as if it hadn't been cleaned in a long time.

  She relieved herself. Then she went to the mirror. It was still her old face. Her eyes were red. She drew a comb slowly through her hair, attempting to straighten it out. She wondered again when the liquor stores opened in this town.

  The bathroom door opened. It stayed open.

  She turned. Her hand went to her mouth, and the comb slipped from her fingers, the tines hitting the floor making a faint ping that resounded slightly with the echo that all public bathrooms have.

  For a moment he smiled, the smile she had always seen him with when she had taken the requisite number of drinks and when she had bathed him, the alcohol hiding his real, solemn face from her. He was her Billy again. He had grown. His hair was darker, a bit longer. His face was thinner. He had gained perhaps an inch in height. His clothes hung a little loosely on his frame.

  "Hello, Mother."

  She made a gesture of confusion with her hands. "How . . . ?"

  "I came to see you."

  She knew now that taking the liquor into her had been the right thing to do. The fantasy she had had, of meeting him and running to him, telling him that he was her little Billy boy, hugging him to her, was one that could never have come to pass. He was here, and she felt as cold and numb and helpless as she ever had in his presence. He was her boy, had sprung from her loins, and thus she held a love for him that nothing could extinguish, and yet she felt nothing as she stood before him. If she clutched him to her as the genes in her were telling her to, she would shrink back even as she took the flesh of her flesh into her arms. Even as she wanted to shout with happiness, so did she want to scream in anguish, push him away, turn her eyes from him forever. He was here, but he could never belong to her. Nothing had changed.

  Billy stepped into the bathroom and let the door close.

  "Are you well, Billy?" she asked lamely.


  "Yes," he said. Was there a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth? The alcohol was working on her again.

  He had taken a step toward her, and, unconsciously, she stepped back. She was almost at the back wall of the ladies' room, could feel a slight cold draft through the frosted windowpane behind her. Billy stared at her calmly.

  "I missed you," she said, trying to make herself remember that she really had.

  "I know."

  "I have a letter for you from your friends Marsh and Rebecca, from Melinda's home."

  She bent down, fumbling with the catches on her suitcase. "They say they miss you; there's an address where you can write to them."

  The suitcase flipped open, and the letter fell out, along with the empty liquor bottle, which rolled beneath the sink to stop with a hollow sound against the porcelain wall.

  "Oh, Billy," she sobbed.

  When she looked up, he was …

  Smiling.

  My God, she thought. Had she really drunk that much? The liquor was doing it for her, just as it had done when he was a baby. His eyes had turned soft and warm, his face had melted into a little boy grin, as if he had just come home from fishing with his friends on a summer afternoon, something he had never done.

  "Billy?"

  He was smiling, and it was not the liquor. It was real. The liquor coursed through her, but this was real and Billy was being what she always knew he could be. He was her little Billy boy. He had his father's wide smile, the corners of the eyes wrinkling when he smiled, his face glowing, red and healthy. He looked as though he would laugh at any moment.

  "Billy, yes!"

  "Is this what you want?" he asked.

  She felt the cold air of the window at her back. He was standing close in front of her, his face split into an unstopping grin. The features were as rigid as those of a ventriloquist's dummy, a mockery of his face.

  "Is this what you want, Mother?"

  "Billy, stop!"