The Boy: A Novel

by Santoro, Lara

  “That’s one hell of a dangerous tree you’ve got there, Anna.”

  “Dangerous? What’s dangerous about it?”

  “It’s big. Isn’t that right, buddy? Isn’t that a big tree?”

  “Richard.”

  “What?”

  “A tree is a tree.”

  “Baloney,” he said.

  “Baloney?”

  “Baloney.”

  Another week went by. Esperanza was arrested for disorderly conduct in one of the casinos, and Anna bailed her out at four o’clock in the morning.

  “Don’t tell Eva,” were Espi’s first words. “Swear to God you won’t tell Eva,” but of course at the breakfast table Eva sat up in her pajamas. “Oh my God!” she shrieked. “What happened to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Mom, she’s got a black eye! Espi’s got a black eye!”

  Anna stood over her with a bowl of cereal. “It’s okay,” she said. “She’s predisposed.”

  “Espi, I want to know what happened.”

  Esperanza reached instinctively for her cigarettes. “Mijita…” she said.

  “No mijita. Tell me what happened,” and bit by bit, as Anna presided queasily over the improbable exchange between a child and a norte mexicana with the entire history of her dry land—the cellular awareness of so much spilled blood—scored in her face, the story came out of how a man had said something he shouldn’t have.

  “Why did you have to hit him? Why couldn’t you just walk away?”

  Esperanza and Anna exchanged a brief look. Underneath it all, the two women spoke the same dialect, they were equally versed in the language of violence, equally incapable of brooking or even understanding the type of compromise that seemed to come so naturally to Eva.

  “What do you mean, why did she have to hit him? He asked for it,” said Anna.

  “You don’t go around hitting people,” said Eva.

  Silence fell like a gavel.

  “Mamma?”

  “Yes.”

  “You gave me too much cereal.”

  Later that day the phone rang with a number no one recognized, and Anna backed away from it as if from fire. “Hey,” the message said. “This is my number. Call me.”

  “This is my number. Call me. What’s that? How do you begin to account for that?”

  “Eee,” Esperanza said. “That’s nothing.”

  “Nothing? I could be his mother.”

  “Wait until he takes you out to dinner and he has no gas to get back home, forget picking up the check. I need rubbing alcohol.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to mix it with Windex.”

  “Why do you want to mix it with Windex?”

  “So it doesn’t streak. I saw it on the cleaning channel.”

  Anna set out toward town with the dog in the back. To her right, a horse corral was decaying placidly under the great sky. To the left, the untrammeled earth rose and fell great distances along lines both jagged and smooth all the way to the horizon. The sagebrush swayed on either side of her, pliant and docile and nearly gray among so much gray rock.

  Anna thought of a conversation she’d had shortly before the big move, a quiet exchange with an old friend in which she had coolly, dispassionately stated, “A place is just a place.” She’d picked New Mexico for no other reason than she’d been told it was cheap and cheerful, yet after they arrived—she and her little girl with their overnight bags full of all the wrong things—Anna had stepped out into the vastness with a cup of coffee and this place, this uncontained earth under this uncontained sky, had become as necessary to her as the air she breathed.

  It hadn’t been easy. She wasn’t a parking lot mom, not a member of that colorful congregation of formidable hikers who somehow found the time to linger at drop-off and pickup, having formed, Anna suspected, fast friendships in the midwifery center in town. She did not escort her daughter to her classroom by the hand, as seemed to be the custom in the morning, nor did she loiter in the playground waiting for the children’s collective disposition to mature into a staggered, orderly departure from the sandbox or the swings. She had stopped counting hoarsely to ten, more for Eva’s sake than for that of a curiously attired mother of three who had approached her—red-faced, a strange tic in one eye—and informed her that counting to ten had come to constitute verbal and emotional abuse.

  “We do not count to ten,” the woman said.

  “You don’t count to ten.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “What do you do?”

  “We wait.”

  “You wait for them?”

  “Exactly.”

  “For the children?”

  “For the children.”

  “You, the grown-ups, wait for the children.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You should stop smoking dope.”

  “I don’t smoke dope.”

  “You’re smoking too much dope.”

  It had taken some convincing—a few deliberately repetitive talks on the ills of wasting time with no time to waste—but Eva had eventually formed the habit of detaching herself from play the second her mother materialized at the far edges of the playground, reducing Anna’s commerce with the other mothers to zero, and multiplying their dislike of her by a thousand. She had taken no notice until the May Fair, when she’d run into a wall of hostility so thick that she had left Eva with Ree and hightailed it.

  “I don’t understand,” she said to Ree that evening. “What have I done?”

  “You don’t mingle. You don’t volunteer.”

  “I don’t have the time to mingle. I don’t have the time to volunteer!” and to a measurable extent, that was true. After several glorious months of self-financed unemployment, Anna had gotten a job cooking, initially just a couple prep shifts dicing onions and making mayonnaise, then, thanks to the high volatility of all restaurant kitchens, full exposure to the hissing, blistering, humbling inferno of the line.

  “You don’t have time? Well, guess what? Neither do they. They make the time, they make the effort.”

  “But why?”

  “Because a school, every school, is a community project.”

  “A community project? What are you talking about? I’m paying trained professionals to give my daughter an education. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Start volunteering,” Ree said.

  Anna remembered signing off with high amusement on the promise to contribute thirty-five hours of volunteer work to the school. The day after the May Fair, Clean-Up Day, she’d shown up with her own vacuum cleaner, as per instructions, and vacuumed the hell out of every room. The following day, a Monday, she had sent Eva back to the swings.

  “Nice day,” she’d said to one of the mothers, and while that first approach had gone entirely unrewarded, others hadn’t. Slowly, purely through the forgiveness built into the matrix of every woman with small children, she had found her place.

  At the old blinking light, Anna put the car into neutral, checked her phone for reception, saw something out of the corner of one eye, and turned to catch the boy streaking past her like an arrow shot by a jealous god. Off the seat, beautifully balanced on the pedals of his mountain bike—shirt unbuttoned, body offered recklessly to the sun—he saw her and he hit the brakes, coming to an abrupt stop as she drove past.

  She crossed the intersection and a few minutes later found herself parked outside the grocery store in a world flattened to the single dimension of Richard Strand’s son. She dialed Ree’s number.

  “The boy was on a bike,” she said.

  “A bike?”

  “A bike.”

  “Like, a bicycle?”

  “Yeah, a bicycle.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “The boy is ambulating. The boy should stay home.”

  “Have him arrested.”

  “The boy should remain indoors.”

  “Have him shot. No, wait, shoot him yourself. Go to Walmart, get a gun,
and shoot him.”

  Anna took out her car key and ran it hard and fast into the cool metal of a post. “I’ve done everything right, Ree. I’ve behaved impeccably. I’m minding my own business, I’m driving across town, and suddenly, there he is. On a bike.”

  “I’m telling you, shoot the motherfucker. That way he won’t be riding his bike no more.”

  Anna hung up, checked her watch, and called Mia, who was never home.

  “I saw him,” she told the machine. “He had his shirt undone, flapping behind him in the wind. What happened to decency? What happened to the social protocol? Since when do people get to ride around with their shirts undone? And you’re never home. You realize you’re never home?”

  It was hours before she could begin to see that Dr. Roemer was right, that it was all in her mind. Out of her fevered fantasy, out of her endlessly turning mind, had come a projection of need so strong she had galloped to the kitchen less than a week before, grabbed a piece of paper, and written in breathless, jagged strokes, I want you so much my mouth hurts. Had her mouth really hurt? It was hard to tell but it was easy to see, as she rolled up to the old blinking light on her way back, the arbitrary creation of the arbitrary need.

  At the light she covered her face with both hands, appalled by the morning’s violent spasm. A boy flying past on a bike belonged to the world and to godlike the laughter of children through the leaves, the tumult of water over stone, the languor of summer. Let the boy ride his bike, thought Anna, let the boy go; and suddenly, for the first time in weeks, she felt her soul grow still and expand into a state of measurable freedom.

  She drove the rest of the way home whistling badly out of tune, stopped by the post office, picked up a stack of bills, and covered the short distance to her house. There, propped against her gate, was a bicycle. A gray bicycle slashed through with red, a pedal still slowly turning.

  Anna got out and stared, silence settling like dust over the bicycle, the dirt road behind her, the house before her, and every little thing in between: the weeds pushing blindly through flagstone and gravel, the undecipherable progress of a beetle on the gate, the acrobatics of two white butterflies engaged in play. Heart pounding, she pushed the gate open.

  He was sitting bare-chested on the step by her front door, elbows propped on knees, chin propped on hands. “What are you doing without a shirt on?” Anna said, her voice strange to her own ears.

  The boy stood up, sinewy and muscular at once, strong and pale and loose, his veins cutting languidly down the length of his long arms, a tattooed dragon brooding darkly over one shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s get that shirt back on.”

  He slid a lazy hand into the pocket of his jeans. “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? You’re on my property. You’re not wearing a shirt. People wear shirts when they are on my property. People wear shirts in general when they are in public.”

  The boy spread his arms to encompass his surroundings. “You call this public? It’s fenced.”

  “I’m not about to debate public and private with you. Put that shirt back on.”

  Lips compressed around a little smile, the boy picked up a balled shirt off the ground, snapped it open, and pulled it on as Anna began to shout, “Esperanza? Eva?”

  “No one’s home,” the boy said, and before Anna could process the anomaly, he reached for the grocery bag.

  “Let me give you a hand.”

  “What hand? Get off my porch.”

  “Jesus Christ. What are you so scared of?”

  “Who’s scared? I’m not scared. Get off my porch.”

  “I’m not getting off your fucking porch!”

  Anna pulled out her house keys and dangled them in the air.

  “I’m going to go inside. As a favor to your father, I’m going to put these things in the fridge and count to ten before I call the cops.”

  She had the phone in one hand, she had her thumb on the number nine, she had her line ready. There is a young intruder on my property, he’s unarmed and seemingly well-intentioned but refuses to leave. She had the first stirrings of melancholy already, the cold crash of chemicals after a sudden spike. She had cold skin and a cold heart, both feet in the grave and only going through the motions, when the boy, her neighbor’s son, stepped coolly inside and flowed nearly undetected through time and circumstance, gliding as if on wheels across the living room to the window where she stood, phone in hand, calling the police.

  “I’ll take that,” he said, sliding the phone out of her hand.

  Chapter Five

  Luckily, there was the pinky promise.

  “What’s a pinky promise?” the boy asked.

  “An inviolable oath.”

  “What inviolable oath?”

  “You can’t come over.”

  “I can’t?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  So they arranged to meet at his house, a three-bedroom place at the opposite end of town. He opened the door and Anna stepped into chaos so dark and primitive she started taking pictures.

  “Why are you taking pictures?” asked the roommate, a tall, willowy specimen with erratic facial hair and no pigmentation. Anna aimed her phone at a pile of dishes by the sink. The boy came out of the shower.

  “She’s taking pictures,” the roommate said. Anna captured a stratum of toothpaste around the bathroom sink.

  “Jack, she’s taking pictures.”

  “Why are you taking pictures?”

  Balanced on one arm of the couch, Anna shot the mother of all spiderwebs.

  “Dude, I’m not sure I want her around, taking pictures like this.”

  “Put that thing away,” the boy said, so she stepped down and took one last picture of him and his dragon, both still wet from the shower.

  They were still in bed when she asked him why he’d dropped out of college. The boy flipped onto his back.

  “I’d had enough. Psychology 101? Please. We’re running out of potable water.”

  “So you aim to dig wells?”

  “I don’t aim to dig wells, no. I aim to ride my bike, I aim to ski, I aim to surf, I aim to paraglide. I aim to live. That’s what I aim to do: live.”

  “What happens when we run out of water?”

  “I trade my bike for a shovel and the rest for a gun.”

  For a second Anna was tempted to instruct the young man in the way things used to be, to lay out before his astonished eyes the entirely logical expectation that—barring exceptional circumstances typically to do with previously accumulated wealth—the new generations would enter the workforce as soon as humanly possible and contribute, through the acquisition of financial security, to the progress of the human race. It took only the briefest look in the boy’s direction to determine the crushing futility of any instruction, no matter the type.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “A degree is a degree.”

  “A degree is not what I was put on this planet for.”

  “I see. What were you put on this planet for?”

  “Right now,” he said, rolling on top of her, “for you.” And while the attention pleased her, Anna couldn’t help but privately lament the transformation of an entire generation of would-be men into drifters and vagabonds.

  She’d had the conversation with Richard Strand, of all people. He’d married at age twenty-five. By age twenty-seven, he’d held his first son in his arms. Richard Strand came from money but, still, upon marriage he’d secured a job at a bank and brought in his first paycheck. Later he’d opened a restaurant, worked eighteen-hour days, cajoled waitstaff and dishwashers, upgraded to a full liquor license, brought in chefs, changed menus, made big bucks.

  “It was never a thought,” he’d said to her, “never a thought that you wouldn’t get a job and work your ass off. You had to work your ass off. You had to make money. You had a wife who wasn’t making any money. You had a kid who was a couple decades away from making
any money. You had to make money. Then women started making money and look what happened.”

  “Drifters,” said Anna.

  “Vagabonds,” said Richard Strand.

  Later that day, Anna and Ree examined the contents of six photographs on Anna’s phone. Ree shook her head. “I’d get a tetanus shot before going back in, man.”

  “It’s like the apocalypse, the second coming. What kind of person manifests this kind of mayhem?”

  “A kid who just dropped out of college?”

  “I don’t know. I nearly dropped out of college. No place I ever lived in looked remotely like this.”

  “He’s a guy. A guy living with two other guys. What are they like, by the way?”

  “Major overachievers. Future pillars of the community. One picks up trash for a living, the other one grooms dogs.”

  “What about him?”

  “He waits tables.” They sat in silence as a shot of primordial slime on the living room carpet faded slowly to black.

  “Why did he drop out?”

  “We’re running out of potable water.”

  Ree gave her a long, uncritical look. “I get it,” she said, “I get it. What’s he going to do with a degree in accounting when we end up with no water?”

  “What’s he going to do with his bike?”

  “Same thing as a degree in accounting,” said Ree, “but after a shit ton of fun.”

  At home, Esperanza and Eva had the cleaning channel on. “Mamma, you need to get Espi Mop & Glo.”

  Suddenly attuned to the elapsing nature of things, to the brittle ecology of all sanctuaries, Anna was quick to acquiesce. She needed these two sitting on the couch, she needed the improbable blues and oranges of the cleaning channel, she needed the dog staring miserably from under his brown cap with holes for his ears, she needed them inside with her and the rest of it outside, cast out, banished like the dark to the outer edges of her property, where the coyotes skulked and screamed and a wolf had once made a ghostly appearance in the middle of a storm, sitting immobile for hours under a thickening mantle of snow.