by Laura McNeal
Amos kept striding ahead, trying to beat the achy feeling back into dullness. The bad part, the really awful part, was that when his father was there, Amos hardly ever gave him a thought, and when he did give him a thought, it was usually negative. He’d been embarrassed by the clothes he wore, the corny jokes he told, the job he had, the Moose Lodge meetings he went to. Things that, he knew now, didn’t matter one little bit. The things that matter to me go way beyond surface beauty. Wasn’t that what his dad had said that day to Clara?
Ten minutes later, they stopped off at McDonald’s for turnovers and hot chocolate. It was warm inside, and uncrowded—a businessman reading the sports page, a couple with a road map spread on the table in front of them, two older guys in black leather jackets, who gave Amos and Bruce a fractional glance before dismissing them. Bruce finished off his hot chocolate and began idly ripping the paper cup into narrow strips. “I’ve been in Iowa, in case you were wondering.”
“Iowa? I thought you were suspended.”
“I was. But the Judge didn’t want me home unsupervised because he was afraid I’d find his hooch or something, so he shipped me off to my uncle’s outside Council Bluffs. They have a farm. It’s calving season. All night long, they get up every two hours to check to see if any of those moonfaced heifers need help giving birth to moonfaced calves. My father gave my uncle orders that I had to make all those rounds with him so I’d begin to appreciate the life I lead here in Gemstone. It worked, by the way. I got to drive my uncle’s truck some, which was fun, but otherwise it was one l-o-n-g week, partner. I was dying to come back. I wouldn’t be here today except my uncle thought my suspension only went through yesterday instead of the rest of the week. So here I am, back on holiday.”
“That was pretty good you didn’t give them Foley’s name.”
“Yeah. I don’t know what got into me.”
“What’d you do with the other pictures?”
“Destroyed ’em. Just like I told them.”
“How come?”
Bruce folded his empty chocolate cup into itself. “I just started thinking it wasn’t that fair to Anne Barrineau to have her pictures flying all over the place. I mean, Foley was passing them out like party favors.” He looked up, ready to change the subject. “So you go and look at your dad’s body beforehand, that’s what my brother told me.”
“Yeah, we did that last night.”
“What did he look like?”
Amos considered it. “Like a wax dummy of my father except whiter and smaller.”
“You didn’t touch him or anything?”
Amos shook his head, but the truth was he had. He’d lagged behind his mother and sister and gone back. First he touched the suit. Then he touched his face. It didn’t feel like skin. He didn’t know what it felt like, but it didn’t feel like skin. Amos had looked at the body and said good-bye out loud. Now, to Bruce, Amos said, “I was mean to my dad the night before he died.” Amos thought of the Chinese checkers, and the sharp-achy feeling came rushing back. He fell silent.
Bruce started to say something but held back. Finally he said, “We all screw up sometime, Amos.”
Amos stared out the window. “It’ll snow,” he said. He wondered what Clara was doing right now. He’d decided that after showing up and acting like a zombie the other night, he would have to call her and try to act completely normal, but he knew he should wait until after the funeral.
“Want to head back?” Bruce said.
“Naw. Not yet. Besides, there’s something I want to check out.”
They hiked up the old school hill, then, following Amos’s lead, swung left on Adamson.
“What’s the destination?” Bruce asked, and was ignored. They walked another three blocks, and Bruce said, “Well, then, how about the estimated time of arrival?”
“Thirty minutes.”
When they got to Foothill Park, Bruce stopped to watch some girls sledding in stretch pants, but Amos kept walking until he reached the farthest soccer field. Foothill Park adjoined and overlooked Fairhaven Cemetery. From the last soccer field, Amos stared down at the cemetery layered by snow, the headstones stark and gray, the trees bare. Perhaps a hundred yards beyond the woody lilac hedge, near the grave sites of Amos’s grandparents, a large yellow backhoe was droning and clanking. The huge toothed bucket bit into the frozen earth, turned stiffly, dropped the dirt into a growing pile to the side. Another worker stood near the hole holding a Styrofoam coffee cup and smoking a cigarette and glancing up at the sky as the snow began. Amos watched the grave digging for a while, for a longer time and more intently than he realized, because when he finally turned around, he was surprised to find that Bruce was standing silently behind him, watching, too.
It was a dry snow, large flakes floating through the stillness. Bruce stared at Amos for a moment, his face full of awkward misery, and then, suddenly, Bruce tilted his head toward the sky and, closing his eyes while opening his mouth wide, let the snow fall into it.
21
CONTACT
Clara added Mr. MacKenzie’s obituary to the envelope containing the newspaper clipping about Amos’s head injury. The photograph of Mr. MacKenzie was not at all like the navy portrait of her own father, whose face at twenty-two seemed to be frozen in some perfect light. Mr. MacKenzie’s face was blurred, as though the picture had been snapped at some happy, crowded event in color, not black and white. He was smiling, looking off to the side, and his collar wasn’t buttoned up. His age at the time of death was forty-four, the obituary said. A memorial service would be held Thursday morning at ten A.M. at Burke’s Mortuary.
Maybe she would go. And then, a second later, she thought, Yes, I will.
Thursday morning, as she put on her black tights and black skirt, Clara wondered if she would tell her father she was going to the funeral. She knew she should, because she needed a note from him to excuse her absence. But she wasn’t sure she would.
Clara didn’t have a black blouse, so she settled on the plain white one she’d worn in chorus. Her black shoes had grown tight since she wore them to the ballet with her mother in the fall. Looking in the mirror and trying hard to retract her toes, Clara felt something was missing. She looked like a housemaid, she decided, a housemaid with a crooked nose. For the millionth time, she wondered how much too much a nose operation would cost. Then she went downstairs.
Beneath the oversized barbecuing apron he was wearing, her father was ready for work—beige pants, blue Ivy League shirt, maroon tie. Eggs and sausage sizzled in a black skillet. English muffins lay hot with tiny pools of melted butter. Since Clara’s mother had announced her departure for Spain, her father had turned into Mr. Mom. He wasn’t a very good cook, but Clara didn’t mind.
“Good morning,” he said when Clara turned the corner. He eyed her attire and asked, “Singing in the chorus today?”
Clara tried to think how she should present her plan. To stall for a minute, she just said, “No, I’m not in chorus this year.” Now was the time to say she was dressed for a funeral and needed him to write a note, but she didn’t.
“Milk, orange juice, or both?” her father asked from the refrigerator.
“Milk.”
The bus was the problem. To get to the funeral, she had to take the city bus, and her father thought the city bus was dangerous.
Toward the end of breakfast, after a long sip of coffee, her father said, “Do you want a ride to school?”
Now, Clara told herself. Explain. But she didn’t explain. She sat slicing her last sausage, wondering if her father could see her cheeks flush, but when she looked up, he was busily gathering up dirty dishes. “No,” she said, choosing her words to make them slightly less a lie, “I’ll probably just walk.”
The bus trip was a nightmare. The transfer bus she was supposed to catch was early, and her own was late, so the place where they should have intersected—a blue bus sign beside a Frostee Cone and You Bet Dry Cleaning—was deserted. The next bus wasn’t due for forty m
inutes. While she waited, little wispy flakes of snow blew down, the stoplights changed from crimson to green a hundred times, and behind all the approaching headlights were the faces of strangers who seemed to view her—if they saw her at all—with the same suspicion: Why wasn’t she in school? She kept expecting her father to drive by, to stare at her in disbelief that would turn to anger when he realized she’d lied to him and skipped school.
When at last the city bus approached, she was so grateful that she thought she would cry with relief, and hardly cared that her watch showed ten-fifteen. The funeral had already started. The bus was warm and nearly empty, but it wound so slowly down so many strange avenues that when it finally stopped one block from the mortuary, it was a quarter to eleven.
The service was over, but people were still milling around outside the mortuary. Clara stepped into the lobby in her wet, pinching shoes, and there, beside clusters of adults in nice clothes, was Amos. He was standing with his back to her, looking at an oil painting on the wall with his hands in his pockets. The adults were talking in low voices. When someone laughed, it was subdued laughter. From behind the closed chapel doors, an organ was playing. Amos looked so formal standing before the painting that Clara had the impulse, for a moment, to walk back out. Instead, she walked up and stood beside him. “Hey,” she said in a low voice.
When Amos turned, she saw that his eyes were still dark around the edges and a little puffy. He smiled awkwardly. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“I meant to be here for the service,” Clara said. “I missed the bus somehow.”
“It’s nice you came,” Amos said, looking down again. The stitches were out on his forehead, but the incision line was still visible.
“I wanted to,” Clara said. She shook her coat to let some of the water run off. Her feet were freezing.
Neither of them said anything for a time, then Amos said, “Aren’t you missing a big test today in Duckworth’s class?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “Sometimes he’s nice if you explain things.”
“Sometimes he isn’t,” Amos said a little glumly.
Clara nodded at the painting behind Amos, a shaft of light breaking through clouds to illuminate the open sea. “Were you looking at that because you liked it?”
“Not really. I was just looking at it so I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody else.” He regarded the painting. “I think it’s meant to calm you down, but instead it’s just kind of sappy.”
Clara smiled. “Yeah, it kind of is.” She looked around at the hovering adults, most of them in groups. “Lots of people,” she said.
Amos nodded and quickly scanned the room. “What’s weird is, I really didn’t know my dad had so many friends.”
After a second or two, Clara said, “So what happens now?”
“Oh, there’s a smaller graveside deal.”
At that moment, Bruce stuck in his head from a side door. “Hey, Amos, they’re waiting on you.”
Amos turned to Clara. “I know this isn’t the greatest field trip of all time, but do you want to come? We’d just ride with my mother and sister. And Crook. They already said I could bring Crook along.”
Clara didn’t know. “I really should get back to school.”
Amos moved toward the door, but he was still talking. “The graveside service is supposed to be short.” When he got to the door, he stopped, turned, and suddenly waved her over. His tense, expectant expression made the gesture seem urgent.
There was a long moment during which Clara understood that she was choosing between the pleasure of sitting beside Amos in a car and the safety of not going. By the time she’d gotten to the end of this thought, her pinched, cold feet were already moving in Amos’s direction.
She slid into the backseat between Bruce and Amos, everyone careful not to press into one another. She was introduced to Amos’s mother, whose skin looked actually gray, and to Amos’s sister. Clara had never seen Liz MacKenzie up close before, and if she hadn’t nodded so understandingly, Clara would have been intimidated. She was a pretty, dark-haired version of Amos, busty and dressed in what Clara knew were the right clothes for a funeral: a dark wool jacket with a lot of buttons, a plain dark skirt, a velvet hair band instead of a hat.
At the grave site, Clara stood with Amos, who stood behind everyone else in the family. After Mr. MacKenzie’s minister spoke about his recent baptism into the church, others were invited to step forward and speak. Three or four people from his new church did, saying how happy they were that Mr. MacKenzie had committed to God before going to serve him. Amos was fidgety during these little speeches, and that made Clara fidgety, too.
At that moment, though Clara didn’t mean to, her hand touched Amos’s. She thought he’d be startled and pull away, but he didn’t. He took hold of her hand quickly, as if he’d been waiting for it and wasn’t going to let it get away. A strange and wonderful feeling flooded through her. It was as if all of her senses were driven from their normal places and were now transmitting and receiving everything through her left hand, the one that was holding Amos’s right.
On the ride back to the MacKenzies’ house, Clara sat between Amos and Bruce, who stared silently out the window. Clara felt her arm rest against Amos’s. The sensation reminded her of science films in which molecules were animated to show how they bumped against each other in a liquid and then in a gas.
Inside Amos’s house, she felt less at ease. “This is my friend Clara,” Amos said to a man who had been gazing out the window. “Clara, this is my favorite uncle, Uncle Bub.” He shook Clara’s hand, and Clara realized he was an older version of Amos’s father and that this was the funeral of his younger brother.
Amos led Clara and Bruce out the back door toward his pigeon coop, a wood-and-wire structure that housed twelve pairs of birds; these birds sat on boxes or perches and made a pleasant chorus of throaty gurgling. Toward the top of the coop, there was a landing and opening, with thin metal bars hanging in front of it. “What’s that?”
“A one-way opening.” He demonstrated with his hand. “They can use it to come in, but they can’t get out.” He grinned. “I mean, they could if they were smarter, but they’re not.”
“They are in fact birdbrained,” Bruce offered, which made Clara laugh.
“So you let them out?” Clara asked. “And then they come back?”
“Yeah. They’re racers. You let them out from greater and greater distances and see how long it takes to come back.” He shrugged. “Mine aren’t that fast.”
Clara pondered this process. What if her mother were just like a racing pigeon let out at the farthest possible distance and now Clara would just have to see how long it would take for her to come back?
“See that reddish one?” Amos said, pointing.
In one corner nest, among all the gray and black and blue, a large, beautiful red-tinged racer sat, and perched nearby was an even bigger gray bird, who, Amos explained, was her mate. “That’s Ruby and Hurricane,” he said. Ruby was the only reddish pigeon in the coop. Amos stepped into the pen. He slowly approached her, saying her name in a low croon. Then he laid his hand gently over her back. The beautiful red pigeon blinked and stepped easily into his other hand, and Amos began to stroke the bird’s smooth reddish blue head.
Once Ruby hadn’t come home from a 300-mile drop, Amos told Clara, not for days and days, and Hurricane flew nervously around the pen, stopped eating, and started to molt prematurely. Amos found himself watching the skies from the schoolyard, looking for a huge reddish pigeon who might be disoriented. There had been severe storms, and according to other members of the racing club, nearly 60 percent of the birds hadn’t returned from this drop. That was a lot. Amos had begun force-feeding Hurricane. The bird didn’t like it and would struggle in Amos’s hands, shaking his beak to keep him from inserting the syringe. Each day, he seemed to grow lighter and bonier. Then one day after school, while Amos was feeding him, he heard the shuffle of wings and the soft landing of a newl
y arrived bird. He turned. There on the perch, pacing in front of the one-way bars, was Ruby. “She was pretty ragged,” Amos said now as he stroked the bird’s head, “but she was home.”
“What brought her back?” Clara asked, and didn’t mind when Amos just shrugged, because Clara already knew. Love brought her back. Maybe some weird and instinctive and, well, birdy kind of love, but still, it was love.
“Food!” Liz called out from the back door.
They slid through the adults and stole up to Amos’s room with dishes of chicken potpie. Clara was so jittery that she couldn’t eat, but Bruce sat on the floor with his plate on his knees and ate ravenously. Amos sat on the edge of the bed and ate only the carrots, then only the peas, then only the crust. “I don’t know,” he said when Clara asked why he didn’t eat the chicken. “I guess sometimes it just reminds me too much of pigeon.”
When they finished eating, Amos spread an old army blanket on the bed and counted out pennies from a tobacco tin, and they all three began to play penny blackjack. Amos and Bruce coached her through a few hands, and then she played on her own—very casually, barely counting up the cards in her hand, but she kept winning pennies. “Good thing this ain’t strip poker,” Bruce said. “I’d be down to my jockeys.” He cast a glance at Amos. “Whereas Amos would be down to his boxers.”
It was odd how the grief was impossible to sustain. Clara was glad to laugh, glad even to be embarrassed. “You guys are just letting me win,” she said.
“Bingo,” Bruce said. “So as to suck you into a higher-stakes game.”
“No,” Amos said, sending a shock of pleasure through Clara merely by smiling at her, “you’re just getting good cards.”
During a shuffle, Clara got up and walked around Amos’s room, peering into his closet (a mess), checking out the view from the window (a line of bare trees behind the weathered pigeon coop), looking at the posters on his wall (baseball players, mostly). To the side of his desk was a corkboard she hadn’t noticed before, with photographs and tickets and programs pinned to it. She read them aloud and Amos responded. “Nineteen ninety-two World Series, Game Three, Blue Jays v. Braves.”
