Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  So minute, that skip in time, in itself so infinitesimal, you, Ada, me, on again, off, on, and standing on the floor of that closet, it wasn’t Junie you were thinking of, but Green, how one loss will bring up every other, only Green it seemed somehow, you told me, you could not stop thinking of, like that distance of the twenty years since you’d lost him had collapsed, and everything you should have felt when it happened but didn’t—don’t I know this?—rushed up from the bottom of where you had stuffed it down, and you were left staring over the brink of how, for example, as a baby, teething, he used to chew on the ends of his sleeves, you’d be folding his clothes, those small baby clothes, matching up the arms, and find the little shirt-cuff ends gnawed to thread.

  Like you, Green loved the night, loved the sky. The only boy of yours who did, and older, he would wander out to find you sitting in your lawn chair at the telescope on clear nights when the seeing was good. You would take turns at the eyepiece. You named the stars for him, taught him their magnitudes, their distances, traced out constellations with your hand. But it was the moon he was enthralled by. That nondescript near satellite. It’s grandly monikered features: Bay of Rainbows. Sea of Crises. Lake of Dreams. He was a boy of the lunar age, Apollo missions, the space race and the Cold War that it stood for.

  There were other things, too, you told me that day. Things you did not know you had forgotten—it can happen like this, can’t it?

  I remember your face. On it a haunted shredded look. Not you. Not your face as I see it now. I remember how I kept nodding, how I needed you to keep talking, keep telling the story, your story that could have been mine, as we converged, each detail of your story unlocking a small piece of me, set it floating, set it free. As you spoke, I tried to match the things you said about Green against what I remembered. I hadn’t known him well. I’d heard he was real smart, but different. Didn’t talk much. Kept to his own. Carl told me that Green would crawl into the backseat of one of his older brothers’ cars, ride down with them to Horseneck to watch the races they used to hold Sunday afternoons in the off-season, in the new state beach parking lot.

  I would see him sometimes, Green, just walking by. Digging his way up to the Head, hands shoved in his pockets, walking alone down the center of the road like he owned it.

  Ada has played her turn, made the word E-X-I-T, and drawn new tiles. She is quiet now, her mouth set, studying the letters in her rack. I glance down at the sheet of paper, the columns of tallied numbers under our names. I have not drawn a line dividing them, and it occurs to me that perhaps I should have. To keep us separate, I think.

  The shadow of my hand, the shadow of the pen against the page, like the ink is flowing out of the shadow.

  “It’s your go, Jane,” Ada murmurs.

  This morning, as I was crossing over the metal draw of the new span, it was Huck that caught my eye, funny Huck working out of his rickety old skiff, upriver. That familiar solitude.

  Vivienne told me once about the little hurricane house where Ada lives with Huck now. It was in the mid-seventies, she told me, not long after Green died in Huck’s arms wedged together in that crushed car and Silas finally got around to doing what most figured he would and strung himself up in his barn. It was then that Ada had the hurricane house moved from the farm on Horseneck Road where it had washed up on the riverbank when Hurricane Carol struck in ’54.

  The roof was falling in, that whole little dump of a house falling into itself, but Swig and Junie moved it for her, down onto one of those postage-stamp lots behind the town beach that were selling back then for a song. Ada put a bunch of antiques in and some kitschy stuff, with the thought of renting it. She hired Huck to fix the roof, because he was such a loose cannon, no one else would give him work. Even Junie, who had his own dragger by then, had quit letting Huck fish trips. So Ada hired him to fix up that little house for her. She’d go by every week or so to see how things were getting on, and each time she stopped in, she’d notice another piece of something missing. One week it was a lamp, the next week a clock, then a sterling-silver sugar bowl. She knew what he was doing. She didn’t call him on it, though, just watched the rooms in that little house gradually empty and, in the end, she wound up not renting it after all. Huck’s wife, the carpetbagger, left him, and Ada let him move into that hurricane house until he got back on his feet. He’s been there since.

  This morning, crossing over the new span and seeing Huck out there on the river, I paused. Huck still rising from the ashes of all that. I raised my hand, the quirky little wave my father used to give, then looked away, looked west and swore I saw it—the old bridge—the echo of it. Nascent. Like the air still held it, somehow.

  HURRICANE HOUSE

  HUCK, FOURTEEN

  Winter 1962

  Colder than a witch’s tit, his teeth clacking in his head, as they started walking back toward the Point Bridge, the crunch of frozen grass under their boots—and he could still feel the gash at the side of his temple, the pain smart in it from where that motherfucking nitwit Eejit checked him with the stick—the blood in its wormy trickle down the side of his face gone hard now. The three of them—Huck, Pard, and Robbie Taylor—walked together, the nitwit Eejit dragging behind ten yards, knowing he’s out, lugging those sissy figure skates. And Pard asking Huck if he saw that tall man by the tree, who the hell was that and what was he up to—out for an arctic stroll? Yeah sure. Just hanging around, eyeballing them from behind that tree. Saw him, Huck answered, it was that city nutter mick bridge engineer with the duck-butt hair come down to Clerk the Works, maybe thinking he’d kick them off the bog, tell them they got no business playing stick hockey on his state land. He gave a spit. Got no business. Pervert fream.

  From his coat pocket, he fished out the broken piece of stick they’d been using for a puck and threw it. Where it touched white earth, it sank, leaving the shadow of itself through the hole where it fell and was gone.

  His hands were good and numb, all chapped up, and the sweat on him starting to freeze, a rim of it like crust at the back of his neck, by the time they reached his uncle Swig’s house, five doors up from the Paquachuck Inn, and Huck’s knocking on the door, banging till it opens, asking Swig to give them a ride home across town. That squarehead Eejit hanging around by the front gate, thinking he’ll mooch a drop, too—well, he can just fucking walk, shuckster, two miles whatever, that’s his own damn shame.

  A seal down by the rocks at the Foot of the Lane, its fat self lolling on the ice as they drive by into the last of the light draining out of the sky. They head north, up Horseneck Road, past the Almy place toward Bald Hill, Swiggie driving. Being a broad-shouldered man, sizable, taking up a good half of the cab, the three boys scrunched together on the rest of the seat, Swig hits out a cigarette, steering with his knee, lights up, smoking, they’re all breathing that in, wanting some, Huck asking if they can split one butt between them, and Swig shaking his head with a smile, the tobacco drawn down, that black-flecked orange glow, the cigarette perched out the side of his mouth. They pass the chicken farm, the sign that reads GRAVES DUG AT SHORT NOTICE. Robbie gets dropped off at Skunk Alley. Then it’s just the three of them in the car. Swig takes a drag in on his cigarette, keeps his eyes on the road.

  “You two keeping out of trouble?”

  Huck’s throat goes dry.

  “Yeah sure,” Pard answers for them. None of the three of them speaks for what they all know. Huck feels his head begin to swim, words and no words and the smoke in the car. He cracks the window, lets the cold dusk in. He looks down at Pard’s knee pressed against his, sees the patch on the leg his mother, Ada, had sewed on—they were his old pants, he was younger but taller than Pard, when he outgrew those pants, Pard took them on.

  They drive the next half mile in silence, drop Pard at his house.

  “Poor kid, going home to nothing,” Swig murmurs as they pull back onto the road. Huck doesn’t answer. They drive past the pig farm, the market gardener’s place with that big-ass roc
k in the shape of a horse out front Pard’s always scheming to steal. At the bend, old Mason’s crop of cows nose up to the stone wall, snow on their backs, steam rising off them, stubbled corn in a higher pasture, cut last fall, busted stalks poking up through the drifts.

  “Due for another round of the white stuff tonight,” Swig remarks. He takes a long drag on his cigarette, then passes it over to Huck, who drags in on it himself, deep. It settles his nerves.

  “Finish it,” Swig says as they turn off Horseneck Road, down the lane, and pull up in front of the farmhouse.

  “Go and be a good kid now, help your mother,” his uncle says with a wink. Huck hits the door closed, the truck drives off, a snort of gray smoke out the exhaust, snow spun up under the tires, clouds of snow-dust falling through the blue evening winter light.

  They are already good and into it, his mother and father—he feels it the minute he walks through the door. His two older brothers, Junie and Scott, gone, up to Charlie’s Diner on Route 6 or to that bar down the Cove in New Bedford, where Scott got into the fight last year with a jigaboo, said the wrong thing and got stabbed. Wherever they’ve gotten to, they’re gone, and just the baby, Green, toddling across the kitchen, a knob of bread clenched to mush in his hot chubby hand, and their father, Silas, sitting at the fireplace, polishing his boots, the kitchen full of bad silence, some mess between them he’d just walked into. His mother setting a saucepan on the stove, but setting it down harder than she had to, the bang of it, the lid clattering, and the hiss of whatever was inside sloshing out. That was all it took. His father slammed the tin of shoeblack on the bench and within a moment had crossed the room, swung his arm, and backhanded her across the face. She went flying. From the doorway, Huck watched her go. It was the only time he realized how light she was, his mother, such a force of nature ordinarily, she in her cranked-up moods stomping around—his gorgeous combustible mother—her eyes that sparked green which made you think of things at once safe and fearsome. You’d never realize how slight she really was except in this kind of a moment, when she and his father got into it, and it came to this sort of end—he marveled at it—the room gone into a deep, almost holy still—the hushed snap of the fire, and no other sound or motion but her beautiful self in noiseless, innocent flight—her body lifted as it was, by just the force of her husband’s hand—her body lifted, bare feet skimming over the floor like some kind of angel—a moment of celestial lightness before she struck against some hard and larger object—in this case the cupboard—that broke her flight. A vase on an upper shelf jumped forward, tottered at the edge with the thought of falling, but didn’t.

  Huck moved then. His body uncoiling like a spring across the room, an arrow unloosed, he shot past the table, past the baby, staring stupid, openmouthed, past the stirring heap of her to his father who was moving in to strike her again. Huck did what one of his older brothers would have done—Junie, for sure—and got between them, all 118 pounds of him, he shouldn’t have, but did, and a mistake it did turn out to be. His father whirled around and caught him hard, the slab of his hand made fast to a fist, cutting up into that softer center spot between Huck’s ribs. The room pitchpoled, ceiling spun, the overhead light swapping places with the floor, and he was down, curled up in a fetal ball of himself by the table leg, his mother screaming now, their shadows raged across the wall, the orange glow of firelight, the smell of dinner burnt, the baby Green wailing, and once Huck looked up from where he lay, in a puddle of no breath on the floor, saw his father with his drunked-up, reddened face looming. He pulled himself to. Didn’t think a thing. Just ran.

  Out of the house, past the barn and the corncrib set up on its stone pegs, over the first gate and down between the fields, past the dutchcap to the riverbank, the little hurricane house that washed up there, back in ’54. It wasn’t much, just a step up from a chicken coop really, and all sinking into itself. They’d made a fort of it, he, Pard, Eejit, and Robbie, left some horse blankets there, a few bottles of soda, a tin of sardines, a pile of J. C. Whitney catalogs. He gets inside now, leans back against the door, a fierce throbbing pain in his chest, like a rib got broke off at the small end, poking into his lungs. The floor’s wet, ground and snow leaking through the cracks in the boards, so he climbs up into the loft where it is dry, lies down on the old goose-feather mattress that’s got the stink of damp and rot in it but is soft. He gets all in, good and burrowed under, keeps his boots on, just in case. His body cold, he can feel that cold working through him, playing like tight fingers down his spine, his brain on the numb, his body shivering, and thoughts coming through, like ice, chunks of brilliant silver, thoughts of how someday he’ll kill his father, Silas the bastard, someday when he is old enough, he will, not long now. So what if the fault is half hers? She baits him. Always bringing up old things. She shovels out the blame, all on him, for knocking her up at seventeen, shoehorning her into a life she never wanted. She’s bucked her lot since, one way or another, but the one thing all their arguing seems to drain back to is that tangle she got into with Luce Weld. Years old now, that mess, it was a bad bad time until Weld got taken care of. There was a respite then. She cried a lot, Huck remembers this, but seemed softened somehow—it was a time of near peace between his parents—almost a family—he was glad of it even until that tell-all skull rolled out of the fill.

  Rumor mill started churning then. Talk was his father, Silas, had done it—and he never denied it, seemed to rise to the occasion—who could blame him really, getting square, getting even. Good riddance, most said, back to apple-pie order. But his mother, Ada, man, did she get wild—started picking away at Silas—about what he did or might have done—pick, pick—she brought it up over and over, Huck didn’t know what to do—then like that weren’t enough, she turned sassy, got up to her tricks. A toss of that proud pretty head to let her husband know she’d go on doing what and who she wanted, and if he got wind of some dirt she was up to, she didn’t give a damn. It was her not caring, Huck knew, that did his father in. Made him fly off the handle. She drove him right over the edge with her carrying-on. He’d lash back, shouting that he had poured his life out for her. Drunk, he’d slur on: about how he’d come home from the war, landed a decent job as manager at Woolworth’s, taking that work because he thought maybe wearing a suit and driving into the buzz of the city every day might give him a leg up in her eyes. But she was unimpressed, so he quit that job and came home to putter around on his father’s farm, and then his father died, and that farm was his, someone had to work it, and whether he wanted or not, he was that someone, so there he wound up: stuck, puttering, paring cowshit out from under his fingernails, picking hay, sweating, swearing, collaring one of his sons to give him a help, drinking down gin like water, while his slip of a wife fell hook-line-and-sinker for somebody else. Scallywag Weld.

  She wasn’t easy, and they all knew it, her boys. Even so, they worshipped her. That magnificent flare of her moods, and how at times, as well, she could be so beautiful and calm, sitting by your bed on a night when you had fever, she’d sit there hours with you in the small of the dark, giving you sips of orange juice with crushed ice, her smooth hand on your forehead, the perfect gentle cool of it melting the heat and fear down, and that little song she’d sing sometimes on those nights, how does it go, that song? You and me, Love, she would sing. You and me, everywhere.

  Huck floats through this now. His mind peels loose toward sleep but not quite, his mind into that kind of beyond, like underwater, a soundlessness that’s full of sound, what God might be if crap luck had another name.

  He hears the door creak below.

  “Hey,” he calls down, “that you?”

  Pard’s voice answers. A moment later, his face appears.

  “Didn’t expect you here,” he says, plopping down on the mattress.

  “It was noisy up at the house.”

  Pard grins. “Yeah, well I got home, they were both dead drunk, a bowl of cold potatoes on the table. Figure I’d come down here,
have a real meal.” With his knife, he starts opening a can of tuna fish. “You want some?”

  “Naw,” Huck answers. “Thanks.”

  Pard is like shadow to him, the one he can tell anything to, talk about his screwed-up family—Pard’s is only worse, and he knows it all anyhow even if Huck don’t say a thing. It’s been like that between them—how many years now?—where you don’t have to breathe a word and it all gets said.

  “I’m going to get up early,” Pard is saying now, “get down to the store before they open, see what the bread man left in the box, grab a pie.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Pard’s finished up his tuna fish, he licks out the can.

  “Man, that stuff stinks,” Huck says.

  Pard laughs, throws the can down from the loft. It clanks onto the floor below. He gets under a blanket, the other side of the mattress. That’s how it is when the two of them wind up here on the same night, each takes his own blanket, takes a side. No one’s looking to snuggle, just don’t want to be alone.

  They chat a bit, talk back to the stick-hockey game that afternoon on the bog—and what a rat Eejit was, checking Huck like he did, giving him that scratch on the side of his head.

  Outside, the night is quiet, the river frozen, the hum of nothing moving under snow.

  He wakes at first light, blinded by a whiteness that covers him, a pale glow radiating up from the blanket and at first thinks he’s died in the night and this is the heaven he’s woken under, the loft around him strangely lit, his eyelashes frozen some, like there was crying in his sleep. He rubs at his eyes to break the ice up, crinkling to cold dust, he blinks against it, and he can see then that a fine sheet of snow has blown through a crack under the eaves. It covers him, covers half of Pard under the other blanket where he lies, still asleep. The sun is on the rise, it slants through that narrow opening, glints of hoarfrost stuck to the wood and every crystal of snow reflects, ignites, a soft fire, all colors awakening in that whiteness, blue, red, a solemn amber glow, more snow still sifting down. It is all so unlikely, such a fart of a chance and yet so lit, so brief, so breathlessly lovely, and he is wrapped in that transient and exquisite miracle like everything is blessed. Forgiven. Like it could be.